Dateline Haifa

by D A Kent

  Handing Gunn the key, she said:

  ‘I want you both to have the demeure.’

  Sylvia was shaking her head:

  ‘We can’t possibly…you mustn’t…’

  ‘No arguments,’ Marguerite said, firmly. She turned to Gunn.

  ‘Take this beautiful, clever girl home and marry her. You remind me and Lev so much of us at your age. And with your children, turn Chartrettes into a place where love can flourish again. Do it for me, and for Jonathan and Louise.’

  Gunn took the key and kissed Marguerite’s hand.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That is precisely what I intend to do. All of it.’

  Sylvia was lost for words. Her head was spinning. What was he playing at? Was this one of his cover stories or did he mean it? She didn’t know what to think. This was Gunn, who had challenged her to a wrestling match on the beach and who usually woke her with a playful slap or a dash of cold water to the face. All the same, the thought of that kiss this morning made her shiver in a delicious way. And Chartrettes would be theirs? It was far too much to take in and far too generous.

  She excused herself, deciding to have a moment alone in the olive trees at the front of the house. She closed her eyes and fanned herself with a newspaper she had found in the kitchen. She could hear the murmur of conversation from the courtyard, a murmur that soon succumbed to the cough of an engine. She opened her eyes. A Citroen was drawing up, with a man on each running board. She stood up, shouted, and turned to run. The man closest to her leapt from the car and tackled her into a dusty heap at the foot of the steps into the house. He had knocked the wind out of her and she had banged her head. Out for the count. Good. He picked her up and bundled her into the Citroen, while the man on the opposite running board hosed the front of the house with a magazine from the Sten gun. He followed it up by tossing a grenade through the open front door. It bobbed and rolled along the tiled corridor before blowing up. The Citroen raced away with its cargo and Bin Saladin fingering the worry beads in his pocket, hoping his client would be happy with the decision he had made. The adrenaline and the coffee had been keeping him going. He frowned. There was something not quite right. At the turn of the street, he came to a decision.

  ‘Go back,’ he said. ‘We have papers to get, people to kill. Leaving a job half done looks sloppy.’

  The driver, an old school friend of his, who had fought with the Muslim SS Division in the Balkans, nodded his agreement, threw the Citroen round with no ceremony and hit the floor. Then, he braked hard and switched the engine off. Bin Saladin nodded. ‘Time to go.’

  Leaving a groggy Sylvia in the Citroen, Mueller’s four recruits, weapons cocked and loaded, entered the house. They knew who they were looking for. Alaikum’s ‘intelligence’ had been thorough and accurate, which had made a refreshing change.

  Sol was waiting in the hall, in the shadow of a coat-rack. He allowed the first three men in before stepping out. With a back-handed swing, he took out the throat of Bin Saladin’s old friend. He folded to his knees, eyes glazing, drowning in his bubbling blood. His last sight in this world was a one-eyed Jewish soldier raising a 9mm to his head and slowly squeezing the trigger. ‘Go and find paradise.’

  Gunn took down one of his targets with a double tap into the head, and then stuck his blade through the eye socket of the next, twisting as he did so. The man screamed, from a world beyond pain, and Gunn shot him in the heart for the sake of something approaching mercy.

  Bin Saladin was in the courtyard, alone and with no leverage, as Lev, Marguerite and Aaron were safely in the storm cellar and Sylvia was still in the car. He swore and turned as Sol and Gunn entered the courtyard, blood on their hands, faces and shirts, and their shoes tapping out a rhythm on the brass littering the corridor and entrance to the courtyard. Bin Saladin raised his 9mm, but Gunn shot it out of his hand. Sol shot the Arab in the knees and they put him on the deck.

  Sol looked at him and shook his head.

  ‘Time to talk.’

  He squatted down beside Bin Saladin, whose face was contorted with agony.

  ‘Who is paying you?’

  Silence.

  Gunn slapped him hard across the face.

  ‘Perhaps this will help you to remember?’

  ‘Alaikum,’ spat Bin Saladin.

  Sol looked interested. ‘Someone must be spending some serious money on this. It’s got to be our German friend, hasn’t it?’

  ‘And he isn’t about to go away in a hurry. I would imagine there are more where this one came from,’ replied Gunn.

  ‘ Well, let’s see what we can do to address that,’ said Sol.

  Gunn nodded in agreement. He worked the snout of the Tula into Bin Saladin’s wounded knee. He twisted it each time he asked a question. Sol winced.

  ‘What did you want here? Tell me, and we will ease your passage into paradise’

  Sylvia appeared in the courtyard at that moment, looking dazed and pale, crunching over the debris in the corridor. She swayed slightly, holding the door frame for support. There was a small cut on her cheek.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Uttering a silent prayer of thanks, Gunn said firmly:

  ‘Sylv, go in the cellar, sweetheart. Now. Do you hear me? Don’t come out until we say.’

  Sylvia didn’t argue. She made it to the cellar just in time. Lev opened the door a crack, let her in and locked it, whereupon she promptly passed out again.

  Bin Saladin closed his eyes and gritted his teeth against the pain. The worst part was waiting for the point when Gunn excavated the wound a little more. Another deep thrust and turn (for hurting Sylvia, thought Gunn) and he cried out loud and began to talk. He was spilling the world, things that Gunn didn’t even care about, although Sol made a note of some of them. Bin Saladin took five minutes and then stopped.

  ‘There is nothing more.’

  Gunn smiled. He cradled Bin Saladin’s head in one hand and with the other dribbled some cold water into his prisoner’s bloody and puffed-up mouth. It tasted as good as any other water Bin Saladin had ever known. Gunn cocked the Tula.

  ‘I promised you mercy.’

  The shot rang around the courtyard. Sol smiled, and murmured:

  ‘Top C. Impressive.’

  Gunn had to agree. He let Bin Saladin’s head drop. Sol looked over their handiwork.

  ‘We’d better get this over to the café he mentioned. Make a point. But first things first.’

  A quick telephone call brought Sol’s ‘team,’ as he called it, to the door; six of them, a mixture of veterans of the British army and others who had honed their skills in the Warsaw Ghetto. One was a doctor. Sylvia was back on her feet now and he checked her over. Looking at the cut, he commented: ‘That won’t leave a scar. ‘Just surface. Put a dressing on it.’ He turned to Marguerite, who had trained as a nurse. ‘She might have a bit of concussion; keep an eye on that, especially if she’s sick. Make her rest.’

  They fanned out around the house, checking for reinforcements. Marguerite was in her element, fussing over Sylvia. Nothing on earth was going to get anywhere near the house.

  ‘While these guys clean up, you and I are going to pay a visit.’

  Sol grinned at Gunn and patted the box under his arm.

  ‘We have a delivery to make.’

  ‘We’ll take their Citroen,’ Gunn suggested. ‘I’ll drive, you navigate and hold on tight.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Sol threw the box onto the back seat. Something inside rumbled against its sides before settling. Checking his Browning was fully loaded, he got in. Gunn turned the ignition key and put the Citroen into gear.

  ‘Tell me about this Alaikum character.’

  Throwing out the odd instruction, every few minutes, as they drove through the dark, Sol explained that ‘Alaikum’ (he didn’t know his real name) had been part of Operation Salam.

  ‘Heard of it? You know, getting German spies into Egypt?’

  Gunn nodded thoughtfully. In his days with the
Long Range Desert group, he had heard many stories about Laszlo Almasy, the desert explorer who had headed up Operation Salam. A while ago, Alaikum and a colleague, formerly of the Abwehr, had set up their own Middle East intelligence business, out of Cairo.

  ‘It’s funny, all sorts of people use them, from all sides of the spectrum,’ Sol said, ‘Although you would be foolish to trust them. That aside, their intelligence isn’t bad. They produce a daily briefing. You have to subscribe to it. Not cheap, but then I guess why should they be?’

  ‘Damn good idea’ thought Gunn. He had the germ of an idea himself. He hadn’t been joking when he had thrown out the idea of Clements International to Sylv over that fabulous lunch in Posillipo. It would take some thinking through, expansion, extra staff, and the right investors on board. Still, they had plenty of other fish to fry for now. He would talk to Sylv again. She was bound to have some ideas. He turned to Sol.

  ‘So Mueller is one of their subscribers and he paid them to introduce him to someone who could dispatch me and deliver Sylvia and the papers to London. That’s the gist of what that cove said, wasn’t it? Well, the last bit, anyway.’

  ‘In one,’ laughed Sol. ‘Pull up here, we’ve arrived.’

  The Citroen idled down to a halt, its wheels gently scraping the rough kerbstones. Nobody in the café or in the street paid it the remotest attention. It was nothing out of the ordinary. That was good.

  Gunn peered into the café. Five or six men, for the most part with the comfortable air of men of the world, chatting and drinking coffee and drawing on Turkish cigarettes. He turned again to Sol.

  ‘Right then, subtle or in like Flynn?’

  ‘In like Flynn?’

  ‘You know, the film star, straight in, no mucking about.’

  ‘Oh, in like Flynn,’ Sol chuckled. ‘You really are quite mad.’

  ‘Of course. I am an Englishman.’

  The customers in the café looked up idly, as Sol and Gunn strolled in, for all the world as if they were about to order a coffee. They looked up again, sharply this time. Most café customers were not splattered from head to toe with blood.

  ‘Evening, gentlemen,’ said Gunn pleasantly, as Sol walked up to the counter. Taking the grisly head of Bin Saladin out of the box, its lips drawn back in a grimace, he set it down carefully so that it looked as if it was surveying the scene.

  ‘A warning for you,’ Sol remarked casually. He turned on his heel and walked out with Gunn.

  The customers recoiled in horror, too shocked even to attempt to remonstrate or give chase. One of them, slightly younger than the rest, looked thoughtful and went to the café door for a moment as the Citroen tore away, his hand reaching into his pocket for his worry beads. Bin Saladin was his cousin.

  They abandoned the Citroen a couple of streets away, Sol adding a flourish by tossing the ignition key to a pastry seller on the corner. The man could not believe his luck. Sol nudged Gunn in the ribs.

  ‘Now they’ll follow that car. They’ll get confused, because neither of us are in it, and probably write it off.’

  Sol predicted, with local knowledge, that there would be a taxi rank around the next corner. There was. He rousted a driver from his nap and offered a more than decent fare, which was accepted with alacrity.

  ‘I don’t think we will have any trouble for a little while,’ ventured Sol, as the taxi ground its way up Mount Carmel.

  ‘Yes, but Mueller isn’t going to give up, is he?’

  ‘Not until we make him,’ smiled Sol. ‘If you catch my drift.’

  ‘I do indeed’ said Gunn. ‘Let’s talk about it in the morning.’

  Back at the house, while Sol talked to his team, Gunn took over from Marguerite, keeping watch over Sylvia. She said she wanted to go to sleep. Marguerite, ever the experienced nurse, thought this would be fine, as it was the time when she would normally sleep, but that he should keep an eye on her. There was a small spare bedroom. Gunn made himself comfortable on the floor with a pile of cushions. After a while, he went over to the narrow bed, climbed onto it and held Sylvia close for a few moments, feeling her heart beating against his. With a sigh, he tucked her up and gave her a kiss. This time, he wanted to do things properly. There was something he wanted to tell her, which had been on his mind for a while; meanwhile, though, he and Sol had work to do.

  On the floor, more comfortable than the fleapit and cleaner too, he started to think about Mueller. That article in Le Figaro, which they had cut out and kept, said he was living in southern Bavaria. It shouldn’t be beyond the wit of man to track him down. However, he was unlikely, even at the age of, what, late fifties, to go down without a fight. He might even have security. He and Sol would talk it over tomorrow. That bastard had to be taken out.

  Chapter 15

  In the morning, Gunn sat with Sol and Sylvia, trying to piece as much together as possible on Mueller. Marguerite had already given them the photograph of him with George. He was relieved to find that Sol’s German was excellent. Sylvia had offered to go with them to interpret. That idea had been firmly ruled out.

  ‘So, as we thought then, late fifties, married with four grown up children and some grandchildren. Wife is called Elise. About the same age.’

  Marguerite came past with some orange juice for them.

  ‘I remember Marta saying she wore the pants in the relationship. Fearsome lady. Probably made a change for him to be a bully in the workplace.’

  Sylvia got the article out again.

  ‘Here we are. Bad Kaltenbrun is where he lives now. Wonder if that is anything to do with George or Lothar or whatever he calls himself?’

  ‘Quite possibly. Maybe a shared joke or reference to their joint situation.’

  Gunn considered further and started to turn an idea over in his mind.

  ‘Look, we can fly from here to Limassol. There are RAF bases in Cyprus. I’m sure we could cadge a lift from one of those into Germany. We’d have to drive in to Bavaria, as it’s under US administration, but I’m sure we could liberate a motor somewhere along the line. Play the part of a couple of officers on leave, exploring. We’ll hide in plain sight and try and track him.’

  ‘What will you do once you have tracked him?’ asked Lev.

  ‘Bury him,’ came the response.

  By lunchtime, Sol had tickets to Limassol and the name of a contact at RAF Akrotiri. The plan was coming together; only the very last part was up in the air but that was not uncommon. Sylvia had no concerns. She hugged Gunn to her.

  ‘I’m going to miss you.’

  ‘I know, sweetheart. I’ll miss you too. But we’ll be back before you know it. You look after yourself, plenty of rest and sunshine. And don’t fret. You’re in the safest possible place.’

  He folded himself into the back of a jeep with Sol, driven by one of the security team guarding the house night and day and started the drive to the airport. Sylvia felt Marguerite’s hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Don’t you worry about him. He’ll be back. That one would walk through the gates of hell for you. I can tell.’

  ‘And I’d do the same for him,’ thought Sylvia, watching the jeep disappear round the corner.

  In his little office, high in the mountains of Bavaria, Mueller inched his way gingerly towards the ticker tape machine. Elise had been, perhaps, a little too over-exuberant with the riding crop last night. He swore when he caught sight of what was coming through, and swore again as he dropped into a chair to berate Alaikum over the telephone.

  Dummkopf! He almost screamed the word. ‘What the hell is going on? You are telling me that Bin Saladin’s head was delivered to a café? What sort of madman are we dealing with? Now the assets are at large? And they have protection? This is unacceptable. Is this how you treat your clients? Find them both now. I don’t care how much it costs.’

  Squirming a little, he tried to gather his thoughts. Bin Saladin had been, he was assured, one of the most skilful and deadliest operatives in the area. Why then in God’s name had h
e bungled this operation? The intelligence had been clear. How difficult was it to capture one girl and to kill one man? Then again, he reasoned, it wasn’t just them now. They had reinforcements. Where the hell were those papers? His number could be up.

  A sense of foreboding began to creep over him, as if a stitch in his tapestry had been snagged and was unravelling. He tried to think clearly. He was not, as that in-bred idiot Lothar had led him to believe, dealing with two amateurish academics from London. The message they had delivered about Bin Saladin was loud and clear. They were prepared to kill, in the detached manner of the professional. Perhaps he should speak to Alaikum again, in a more conciliatory fashion. And maybe the time was coming when Operation Crown Jewels would have to be put into operation for him and Elise, although it had always been his dearest wish to live out his days in the Fatherland. Grimacing in pain as he moved, he picked up the telephone again.

  In Cairo, Alaikum took a sip of water and smiled at his colleague, Otto Eppler, formerly of the Abwehr. Life was good. Money was rolling in. They were about to move to larger premises although both rather liked it where they were. He was turning over a note the boy from the bank had delivered by hand, notifying them of a large payment that had come in, drawn on a bank in Tel Aviv. ‘Large’ was putting it mildly.

  ‘Well, my friend,’ said Otto. ‘That’s put the cat among the pigeons, as the British say. What are you going to do now, Mr Duplicity?’

  Alaikum thought for a moment. Mueller had subscribed to their services for some time, and had always paid without a murmur. Clients like that had their value. However, he had been damn rude. He had insulted their professionalism and integrity. That was too much. He could go to hell in a hand basket.