Operation: Red Crescent – A Touch of Fate

Wow, is it done already? Holy crap, I guess so… Coming in at just under 50,000 words, this is officially one of the longest stories I've ever written. I'm actually quite proud of it.

Now – to business: First off, there will be a sequel, entitled Operation: Bury Your Dead. Keep your eyes open, because I'm putting it up soon, after I get in a new chapter apiece for each of my other fictions.

For the sequel, I think I know where I want to go with it, but at the same time, I don't really, so any and all feedback is awesome. And no, I'm not review mongering. I do want to hear from ya'll, now that we've made it to this juncture.

Anyway, it's been a real pleasure, and I hope you do keep reading with me, but if you don't, I hope you've enjoyed the ride. I certainly did. =)

What part of FANFICTION do you copyright lawyers not understand? Was it the 'fan' or the 'fiction' part that tripped you up?

………………………………………………………………………

Yedit Shalom opened her eyes blearily. She was in an interrogation room, far below the building that masqueraded as the headquarters of Mossad in Rechovot. Her hands were cuffed to the table in front of her.

The agent felt her steely control slip.

I'm getting too old for this, she realized, almost amused by the thought. Barely twenty-one, and yet she was too old! The thought was amusing. And yet, at the same time, it was not quite what she had meant.

I'm getting too old for playing the traitor, she amended her internal and unspoken complaint. As a child, she had craved rebellion, enjoyed waving her illicit activities in her father's face.

But now… now she was a soldier. She was too patriotic, to invested in Israel, to have to keep pretending to betray it. Perhaps, if she ever got out, she would join the army. Nice and simple and clean, as far as she was concerned. She didn't fear violence or pain, or death.

The door snapped open. Yedit had expected her father to walk in, but it was Dani. He closed the door behind him, and sat across from her.

"I think you need to hear something," Dani said, placing the Notebook computer he had been carrying onto the table between them. He hit the spacebar, and a recording started playing.

"My name is Levi Kroll…"

Alex.

He had been captured.

Yedit forced her face to remain impassive as she listened to Alex trading snarky comments with the man. She shook her head outright when she heard him daring Kroll to torture him. The boy was what, sixteen, tops?

The recording shut off, and Dani met Yedit's eyes.

"We verified the identity of the man speaking," he said. "Levi Kroll used to work for us, and became rather… disheartened after he finished his work in Mossad. He is one of the founding members of the criminal organization Scorpia, and he is a very dangerous man."

Most of the men I know are, Yedit wanted to say.

"What we do not know is the identity of the boy who is speaking," Dani said. "I assume that he is the same teenager that helped you escape Mossad in Egypt."

"How did you get this tape?" Yedit asked, neither confirming nor denying what Dani had said. How he had gotten the tape was directly related to how much she felt she could tell him about Alex. If he had gotten it from British Intelligence, she would give him the full story. But if Alex himself had sent it, she would have to do a bit of covering up. MI6 would not thank her for outing Alex if they didn't want Mossad to know.

"MI6 told us one of their agents had recovered it," Dani said. He stared at the tape in sudden realization.

"Not – the boy?" Dani's voice was weak. Yedit nodded.

"MI6 hoped that he could help me recover the missing information," she said. "They needed to get him out of London for a bit, and he's apparently quite a good agent…" her voice faded off.

"He'll get out," she said, confidently. Dani looked unsure. He shook his head, and then gulped.

"Yedit, this afternoon…"

He looked almost like he was going to be sick, Yedit thought uneasily. Surely he couldn't only be referring to her destruction of the Knesset building?

"A nuclear bomb nearly landed in Jerusalem," Dani said. "It was shot down, but it destroyed a lot of the surrounding area. The city has been largely vacated, because we don't know what kind of lasting damage there has been."

Yedit stiffened. How many people were dead? How many of those deaths could have been avoided if she had acted faster?

"It's a small consolation now, but both Netanyahu and your father feel that this is more than enough proof of your innocence. You're to be reinstated in Mossad, if that is what you want," Dani said. The challenge was there: he wouldn't blame her for walking away, but he would never see her the same for it.

"As a full agent," Yedit qualified. "No more of this playing the traitor business. We both know I'm useless as a mole now. My job lies in the shadows. It always has."

Dani nodded. He stood and unlocked Yedit's handcuffs, helping her stand.

Yedit stood, and followed her fellow agent upstairs, into a much-changed world. How much a difference a few hours made! She knew that Israel was doing to need agents like her if it was going to survive. It was time to turn her attention to the defense of her world.

Yedit was surrounded by a icy calm, but inside of her, there was a tiny little girl, crying and sobbing, gasping for air, mourning those deaths.

Yitkadal V'titkadash Shemei Rabbah…

Glorified and sanctified be His name…

………………………………………………………………………

Hours of boredom turned to days.

The only person Alex saw was Dr. Stevens, and the ever present guards just outside of his door.

His strength returned quickly.

Every spare second, Alex worked on improving his dexterity, his endurance. He went through kata after kata, fighting through the boredom, imagining the day when he would finally break free. Being stuck in this tiny room was getting to him – he had always been a solitary person, but this complete lack of contact from any person was unnerving and unsettling. How long would Scorpia just leave him here?

Alex knew he should be grateful. At least he wasn't being tortured.

Days wore on, and Alex was finally outside in the hallway. Unheeding of the guards at either side, Alex ran the length of the hall several times, reveling in his freedom. He was disappointed when his antics failed to raise a reaction from either stony-face guard, but he wasn't complaining. He was free.

Days bled together, and Alex had no idea how long he'd been in captivity when Levi Kroll came back.

"Hello, Alex," he said pleasantly. "I'm glad to see you've regained much of your former strength."

"Well, when you've got nothing but time," Alex said cautiously.

"Have you reconsidered our offer?" Kroll asked.

"Yeah, I have," Alex said. "And I'm not joining you guys. End of conversation. Now if you could just drop me off at-"

"It doesn't work like that Alex," Levi said, smiling. "And it would be a shame for us to have to kill that Daniels fellow when he really is shaping up to be such a good agent."

Alex froze at the unconcealed threat in those words.

"That's messed up," he said. "You got him to switch sides by threatening me, so now you're going to make me do the same by threatening Ben?"

"It is as Julia Rothman told you," Levi said, sounding bored. "The world is not black and white. Grow up and accept it."

"I'm not saying that MI6 are the good guys," Alex said. "What I'm saying is that you lot are a bunch of bastards, and you killed my dad."

"Is carrying the grudge of your father worth the pain?"

"Was it worth it to try and shoot me when I killed Julia Rothman?" Alex glared back.

"You will agree to join us in the end," Levi said calmly. "Might it not be as well without all the pain? What do you gain by holding out?"

His voice was light, more curious than threatening. But Alex knew that there was nothing but malice hiding behind that innocent – sounding curiosity.

"Surely you still cannot defend the actions of MI6, not when they have intentionally thrown you into the path of danger so many times? Not when they have so completely disregarded your life?"

Alex grit his teeth together. MI6 had used him. They had risked his life countless times, forcing him to do things he was almost one hundred per cent sure no other teenager had ever been force to do. He had been shot at, tortured, nearly killed more times than he could even count at this point, and had dived into some of the most dangerous situations that existed. Could he really stand up for them? Scorpia might at least care whether or not he lived or died…

"Some fights need to be fought, regardless of the cost," he said quietly, Yedit's words giving him the best response he could think of to buy himself time. "And Scorpia is an agency that must be fought."

He let that thought keep his courage steady as Levi considered him. Was the tiny upwards turn at the edge of his mouth because he could hear the uncertainty in Alex's voice? Could he really tell that Alex didn't believe what he was saying, or did he just want to fuck with his head? And then, without warning, he turned.

"You will beg to serve this board on bended knee before we are done with you," he said. No malice, no hate. It was like he was stating plain fact.

Alex shivered.

He would not fall before Scorpia.
He would fight, and he would escape, and help Ben get out of here too.

Just… getting out of this room, the impossible step one, was going to prove a bit of a challenge.

What if he just pretended to give up? Would they believe him?

Alex considered that. He doubted it. They had to know that he would take any chance he could get to try and escape. He was sure that he would be watched very carefully every second he was no longer in his cell.

You could become your father, a voice in his head whispered. Spy on Scorpia, do the job better than anyone, and be the spy he was killed being. That's what Rider's do, isn't it?

Alex hesitated. He didn't want to hide forever as a killer.

Truth be told, he wanted to go home and be a student until he was old enough to actually be a spy. He wanted to enjoy some of what he had of his childhood left.

If he had been at school right now, he would have been starting to think about college applications – and, like the rest of the junior class, enviously watching the seniors received their news back.

He wanted that. He wanted the normalcy of worrying about whether or not he was going to get into the colleges he had applied to, not the moral dilemma of whether or not he should kill someone. One day, Alex knew, he wanted to be a spy. It was in his blood, like a chronic disease, and there was no way he could avoid it now. But he didn't want to have to face that today, or this year. He wanted to graduate high school, get a degree, get a girlfriend. He was too young for this to all be on his head just yet.

Alex closed his eyes and pushed that thought out of his mind.

He was no longer too young. Not too young for MI6 to use him, and not too young for Scorpia to shatter him into a thousand tiny little pieces of agony, just to get him to work for them. He wasn't even too young to die.

Which might just happen if I can't get out of here, Alex thought uneasily. The perfect white of the walls had started driving him crazy days ago, and the lack of companionship was starting to get to him.

He needed a plan.

………………………………………………………………………

"Are we ready to proceed?" The voice was sharp, tinged with a South African accent. It belonged to the red-haired man who sat at the head of the long table.

"At your command," the man on his right said.

The South African man nodded in approval at the statement. His planning, almost ten years in the making, was proving to be effective. Soon, he knew, all of the world would bow before him.

The man's name had once been Evert Zaaiman. He had been born in South Africa under the Apartheid laws, and he had made his escape as soon as he was eighteen, moving to the states for an education heavy in constitutional law and history. He had a photographic memory, and had been top of his class when he graduated.

He would have become a lawyer if he hadn't decided that he enjoyed killing more.

Working with Scorpia had shown him that he was brilliant, not simply in the realm of the classroom, but also with a gun and a target.

Working with Scorpia had also shown him how annoying it was to play second fiddle to the members of the board, who hadn't hired any new members since they had briefly considered promoting John Rider over sixteen years ago.

There was no room for mobility, for change.

Evert intended to create new openings for a younger and more ambitious generation of killers. Unfortunately, that meant a coup of Scopria, and the death of all but one of the board members, an Australian man who sat exactly opposite him.

"We shall soon be very rich then, eh, Devon?" Evert asked, toasting the Australian man when he caught his eye. The Australian smiled, and toasted him back.

"And what of Alex Rider?"

The question was posed by one of the assassins halfway down the table. Evert met the Russian man's eyes.

"Why do you ask?"

"Rider is a child, but he is reasonably skilled," Yassen Gregorovitch said. "Should he become involved, your plans will fail – the boy has an unnatural talent for finding the perfect place to jam a monkey wrench into a perfectly well functioning machine to make it stop, usually by sheer dumb luck."

"Is it your suggestion that we kill the boy?" The Australian man going by the name of Devon asked lazily.

"No," Yassen said. "I believe we should allow him to return to MI6 and allow them to send him on some mission halfway across the world, in the United States, or Columbia, or wherever, and let them do the work keeping him out of our hair."

"Kroll seemed under the impression that you very much wished Rider to become a member of Scopria," Devon said carefully.

"I wished to cease being in the child's presence," Yassen snapped. "He is annoying in the extreme, and I do not enjoy torturing children."

"Very well," Evert said before Devon could respond. There was no need for them to fight amongst themselves, after all, not when they had a coup waiting for them to begin. "Rescue the boy, send him on his way, and do whatever is necessary to keep him away from our operation," he finished. Yassen nodded, and Evert turned the tone of the discussion to the much more serious question of beginning their takeover.

A civil war was about to begin in Scorpia..

………………………………………………………………………

The door opened, punctuating Alex's thoughts on a plan of escape.

Yassen Gregorovitch was standing in the doorway.

"Come quickly," he said, his voice low and urgent.

Alex immediately knew something wasn't quite right with this situation. Yassen looked… apprehensive? Almost scared. His thoughts were confirmed when he joined Yassen at the door, seeing the two guards outside knocked out.

"Why are you helping me?" Alex asked quietly as they headed down the hallway at a fast pace. Alex was pleased that the movement didn't even draw an ache from his wounds, which seemed to have finally healed. He would be able to keep up with Yassen, at the very least.
"Why don't we consider this repayment for me sending you to Scorpia to begin with, and say that you'll still owe me for taking a bullet for you," Yassen said casually. Alex glanced at the assassin's face. Was he making a joke?

"Speaking of which," he began. "Why did you send me to Scorpia?"

"I assumed that you deserved to know the truth about your father," Yassen said bluntly.

"Yet Scorpia only lied to be further," Alex replied, following Yassen through the doorway and up a stairwell. So far, they hadn't meant anyone, but it was only a matter of time.

"I know," Yassen said.

Alex would have asked more – the question of Yassen's miraculous survival was still weighing heavily on his mind – but a shot fired in the stairway, followed by a few yells, made him realize that he had more immediate and pressing issues to deal with.

Crazy bastard, Alex thought as he heard the bullet ricocheting through the stairwell.

"Come on," Yassen said, pulling open one of the doors leading onto a higher floor. Alex surmised that he must have been held underground.

"Wait," Alex said suddenly as they rushed down the hall. He had stopped dead.

"Alex, it is time to move!" Yassen said forcefully, trying to pull him down the hall.

"Ben," Alex said, looking around as if the ceiling would give him a clue as to where the former SAS man was.

"You can't worry about him now!" Yassen growled. "I cannot help him get out too."

Alex felt the weight of those words on his heart like a stone.

"I will look out for him, but we have to move," Yassen said quietly, pulling Alex along. This time, the teenager went, regretfully.

I will come back for you, he swore silently. He would not leave Ben to Scorpia, not when it was his fault that he was in this situation to begin with.

"There they are!" A voice yelled. Yassen fired, and Alex jumped at the sound – Yassen had drawn the gun before he could have even blinked. He heard a cry of pain, and then he was pulled onwards.

"Can you shoot?" Yassen asked, his voice a whisper in Alex's ear so as to not bring any more guards down on them.

Alex nodded and took the proffered gun, trying not to think about what he had to do. He just had to get out of here, and he could examine his conscience later.

An alarm sounded somewhere above them, filling the hallways with an obnoxious siren. It sounded so much like an ordinary school bell that Alex wanted to laugh. The shock of hearing such a normal and annoying sound in a situation like this was surreal.

He managed to contain his mirth – hysterics was more like it, Alex realized – and followed Yassen to another stairwell at the end of the hall. He heard the door at the other end of the hall slam open as they vanished into these stairs. As they started up, an explosion rocked the building.

Yassen, who had been expecting it, held on to the railing and managed to remain upright and mobile.

Alex, who had not, stumbled and fell down a few stairs. Yassen pulled him back to his feet, and they were running again. They ran into another handful of guards on the next floor, and between Yassen and Alex, they managed to dispatch all of them.

The sound of another unit moving quickly down the stairs filled the narrow space.

"Keep moving," Yassen ordered, pushing him through the door of another floor, handing his a magazine clip. Alex switched out his near – empty one for the new one, and went through the door, gun out and ready for action.

The alarm was still ringing, making Alex cringe. He had always hated the sound at school, and it grated on his nerves now. He didn't run into any guards right away. He seemed to have burst out into a warehouse of some kind.

Alex moved quickly, his eyes scanning the room filled with stack upon stack of giant wooden crates. It almost looked like the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Arc, Alex thought, amused.

"Stop!"

Has that line ever worked? Alex wondered, annoyed. He spun around, firing. The guard went down like a lightweight and Alex was running again.

He had to find the exit.

He ran around a corner and found himself staring into the eyes of another unit of guards. Alex turned to run in the opposite direction, but another line of them was waiting for him.

Well, fuck, Alex thought viciously.

"Put down your weapon," one of the men ordered. They were all armed with what looked suspiciously like machine guns, and Alex didn't really want to end up on the receiving end of that kind of firepower.

"Considering you're just planning on killing me once I do, I don't think that that's really much incentive more me to put down my gun, is it?" Alex was trying to buy himself some time. He scanned the area around them. There was no way past either line of guards. So moving down the corridor made by the stacked crates was impossible.

On the other hand, the world had more than two dimensions, Alex thought, looking at the crates themselves. If he managed to get and over that one crate a few feet above him, he would have some cover, and he could drop into the next row and make a run for it.

It was worth a shot.

One of the guards had been talking but Alex tuned him out, paying more attention to the business of getting away. Now he smiled coldly at the guards.

"Later gaters," he said, firing as he climbed up the mountain of crates to his right, one handed. He only just made it behind the crate he had seen, ducking as a flurry of hunfire slammed into the wood.

He moved away, jumping up and over the crate on top of the stack not a second too soon either, because it seemed that that crate had held incendiaries. Alex was thrown to the floor by a massive explosion, ignited by the gunfire.

A pair of hands pulled him to his feet, and before Alex could fight back, he saw that it was Yassen that was trying to help him right himself.

"Just in time," he said. Yassen smiled tightly, and they took off running moments later. There were yells from the row next to them, but they didn't meet anyone else as Yassen headed them towards the exit. They were out and running before Alex could even register that it was a bright and sunny day, and there was wind blowing at his face.

He stopped dead in his tracks, but he was pulled forward again by Yassen's momentum.

"Move!" Yassen called.

Another explosion, behind them, made Alex look back.

The whole building was on fire. He wondered what had happened to everyone underground.

And then he looked around at his surroundings for the first time.

It was sandy and hot outside, desert stretching out around them. If it hadn't been for the big warehouse, Alex would have thought that they were in the middle of a massive desert.

Which, it seemed, they were.

"Where are we?" he asked.

"We are in Tunisia," Yassen answered, moving towards one of the jeeps parked about ten yards from the burning building. He was no longer rushing, but his movements were quick and precise.

"We should get moving now, before they send reinforcements to find out what happened," Yassen continued.

"Aren't you going to be in trouble for helping me?" Alex asked. And murdering a whole bunch of guards in the process.

"Worried about my safety Alex? I'm touched," Yassen said sarcastically, reaching through the open window of one of the jeeps to open the car.

Alex rolled his eyes.

"What is this place?" he asked instead as Yassen lowered himself to the floor of the car on the drivers side to pry away the plastic façade below the wheel. Alex realized he was going to try and hotwire the car.

"It used to serve as a base for the PLO when they were effectively banished to Tunisia," Yassen said. "Since then, Scorpia has been using it as a holding cell for their more… troublesome… captives."

"I hate to bring up the fact that you brought me here to begin with," Alex said as the engine roared to life, "but… um… you did. So can you please explain what the hell is going on?"

"I've had a tail on me since I recovered from the injuries I sustained on Air Force One," Yassen said, motioning for Alex to get in. "I'm afraid Scorpia no longer fully trusts me. Delivering you to them changed that, and allowed me to recover some information for my new employers that has been of great use."

"You mean you no longer work for Scorpia?"

Alex's head hurt.

"No Alex, I do not."

………………………………………………………………………

Three days later, Alex was on a plane back to England. Yassen had procured a false identity and passport for him. He was a British national, Gary Davidson, who had come to Tunisia for a language emersion program, and was finally coming home.

Alex didn't know if it would convince British customs, but he was willing to give it a shot. He was exhausted.

Yassen had parted company with him in the Tunisian airport, giving him a vague explanation.

Alex didn't know what to think of the man. Yassen had killed his uncle, worked with his father, and saved his life numerous times.

He was clearly one of the bad guys, so why was he trying to keep Alex alive?

The question was like a fly buzzing in Alex's ear. He couldn't stop concentrating on it.

Nor could he stop meditating on what Yassen had said about not working for Scorpia any more. What was going on?

Alex's musings were interrupted rudely by a shout from the front of the plane. Alex's head snapped up instantly.

"Everyone get down!"

The voice was yelling in English, and the command was then repeated in Arabic and Swahili.

Screams erupted at the first sight of the man whose face was hidden by a kafia and was holding a pistol in his right hand.

A voice spoke over the intercom.

"This is a hijacking," the voice said. It was male, and definitely Arabic. "If any of you attempt to pull any heroics, you will be dead. If you do not follow our orders, you will be dead. Understand this. I do not care about any of your lives."

More screams erupted, which were immediately silenced when one of the men wearing kafias slammed the butt of his gun into the closest screaming persons head. Unfortunately, Alex was sitting right next to the woman.

Her eyes rolled back in her head when the gun came in contact with her head, and Alex saw her crumple back, feeling a sense of horror penetrate his heart.

What are the odds? He demanded mentally as he locked eyes with the terrorist. What are the fucking odds that one of the first major plane hijackings since 9/11 happens when I'm on the plane? What divine authority did I piss off this badly?

The terrorist looked away, and Alex felt himself let out a breath he hadn't even realized he was holding.

"What do you want?" Someone yelled from the back of the plane.

"It is very simple," the man up front called. The whole plane quieted when he spoke.

"The British government will capitulate to our demands, or July sixth will be a day that will live in infamy in Britain. You all will die, as will a large number of people besides."

Alex was rooted to his seat as one of the terrorists passed by again.

Fuck.

………………………………………………………………………

Ladies and gentlemen, that's a wrap! It has been a pleasure writing for you all, and we'll see you again in Operation: Bury Your Dead!

Well, what did you think? I don't want to be a review whore… but until I get at least five, I'm going to work on my other fics for a little while. =)

(Psst: That means that you should hit that tiny little review button.)

~InK