A ray of sunshine lit up his lap. Abruptly he, Borden, and the two pilots got up and ran to the briefing room. The winds had shifted and dropped, and the wet weather lifted. They were cleared to fly. Both McCall and Borden had binoculars, maps, and a list of the car license plates. Within twenty minutes they were airborne toward Yugoslavia.
They had a bumpy time of it. And staring through binoculars at the license plates was dizzying, especially with the large number of vehicles; the main road through Yugoslavia was jammed with traffic in both directions.
At last McCall saw a long string of cars that seemed to be riding in a convoy. As they approached, he saw that many of them exhibited the French auto symbol. It took the driver two passes to get low enough to read the plates. The pilot called them off as McCall checked his list. He shook his head at the pilot.
“No. None of them match,” he said. They flew on to the next section of roadway, to more license plates and more rough flying.
The onset of darkness forced them to quit for the day.
“We’ll start again at first light,” McCall told Borden.
Borden nodded unhappily. “Every goddammed vehicle in Europe must be driving through Yugoslavia. We’re never going to be able to check them all.”
McCall said, “I think Brewer must be in a hell of a sweat, too.”
Late in the morning, Brewer’s caravan approached the Yugoslavian border. There were extended lines of crawling traffic waiting for clearance, with long delays. The Yugoslavian Customs was searching every car and truck.
They were weighing many more vehicles than normal, checking manifests, examining cargoes. They were going through personal belongings, opening suitcases.
The caravan finally reached the checkpoint, and the guards began a thorough check of all twenty cars.
“Are you carrying any books?” they asked in six languages.
They removed the car seats, searched under the dashboard, opened the hood of the engine, opened trunk lids. All bags were opened.
“What do you seek?” Brewer asked in Italian.
“Books,” said the guard. “Italian books. A very bad book about President Tito. A scandalous biography. It’s full of lies about the Trieste settlement.”
Not one of the Syrian drivers was carrying a book of any sort. By noon all twenty cars had cleared the border check and were racing to the Bulgarian border, more than six hundred miles away. It was nearly dark.
The two planes reached the Yugoslavian-Greek border that afternoon. Crawling traffic at the checkpoint required a number of overflights. Even so, it was almost impossible to read the license plates of the bumper-to-bumper traffic.
They landed at dusk, tired and discouraged. McCall said, “We must have overflown them. They couldn’t have gotten this far unless they were driving day and night and they would need forty drivers for that, not twenty. I figure they’re still in Yugoslavia somewhere.”
“You mean we’re going to have to double back?” Borden asked.
“Yes. All the way back to Trieste almost. And start all over again. But tomorrow we’re bound to find them. I’ll bet you a big lollipop those twenty cars are in Yugoslavia right now, getting ready to stop for the right.
At breakfast McCall and Borden announced the day’s program to the two Italian pilots.
“Today should do it,” McCall said. “But doubling back along the Yugoslav highway, we should spot them quickly.”
The two pilots exchanged glances. “We hope so,” said one of them. “This low-level flying with those winds coming off the mountains is very dangerous. We’ll be glad when it’s over.”
“We should spot the cars in the next two or three hours,” McCall said.
Half an hour later the two planes were back in the air, headed toward Trieste. The auto traffic below was as heavy as ever.
By nine McCall began to feel frustrated once more. By ten he was frowning. They couldn’t have overflown, the caravan again. Those cars had to be down there.
“Hot damn!” he said suddenly.
“What?”demanded the pilot.
“The bastard’s driving at night!” McCall shouted.
They refueled before eleven. McCall asked the two pilots: “How long to the Turkish-Syrian border?”
The two pilots consulted their air maps. “Five or six hours.”
“Okay. Borden, you stick to the air patrol. Ezio, you can take me to the Turkish-Syrian border.”
“What are you doing that for?” Borden asked.
“If my calculations are right, before dawn tomorrow Brewer and his little black sheep are going to drive through the Syrian customs there. And I’m going to be there watching.”
By seven that night, McCall was posted in a car overlooking the Syrian Customs check at the Turkish border, a well-lit oasis in the darkness. It was also heavily guarded.
The Ottoman Turk had been driven out of the Mideast in the aftermath of World War I. But he had occupied the Arab lands, including Syria, for more than four hundred years. The Arab has a long memory, deep pride, and an unforgiving nature. Unfriendliness, therefore, between the Turks and Syrians fairly crackled at the border points. All traffic coming through Turkey was regarded with suspicion by the Syrian guards.
There was an incredible collection of competitive nations stuffed into the confining area of the mideast. Turkey and Syria. Syria and Lebanon. Lebanon and Israel. Israel and Syria. Iraq and Iran. Iran and Saudi Arabia. Russia and Iran. Sticks of dynamite, packed tightly, rubbing together—an explosive friction.
And every hour brought Charlie Brewer closer, with a lighted match.
Borden’s parting words had been: “He’s a goddam fox, that Brewer. Watch your step.”
By six the next morning, McCall was sure, he would see Charlie Brewer and his little flock drive right by him. McCall stepped out of the car, rubbing his eyes, and stretched, then paced up and down in the cold air to fight off drowsiness. Falling asleep could be a catastrophe. When the binoculars grew so cold it hurt to hold them, he got back into the automobile.
The car traffic tapered off after eight that evening but the truck traffic kept coming all night. And the Syrian guards checked over each one with care. They went strictly by the book, checking the trucks and their cargo and their documents, then the drivers and their bags and their documents. Often there was shouting between the guards and the truck drivers.
The weight of each truck was verified on the scales. And the underside of each car was examined by angled mirrors on a pole with wheels.
Brewer was going to have one tough time. If the guards used their mirrors, they would quickly discover the welded pans.
There was something hypnotic about the passing night traffic. Whenever McCall felt drowsy he stepped out of the car. The steady cold breeze would soon chill him, and he shivered and paced. He did knee bends. And he touched his toes. And hummed to himself. Then, stiff with cold, he would get back into the car.
The hours passed slowly. On the back of an envelope, with pencil marks, he began collecting vehicles from different countries. Most European plates looked alike. One had to look at the letter in the oval ring on the trunk above the license plate to identify the country. F for France. CH for Switzerland, and so forth. The commonest European vehicle plates in his count were German. France was second, Italy third. But the Italians had a decided run at eleven o’clock and nearly broke into first place. At midnight the German plates were well in the lead again. Then some French trucks and two Renaults put France back in contention.
At one, he gave a violent lurch. He had dozed. Momentarily, but nonetheless he’d dozed. He stepped out of the car and strolled up and down. It had gotten colder.
McCall versus Brewer. It would be gratifying to best the legendary Brewer. McCall would serve his country and add to his own legend. He would be rated better than Brewer.
He ran in place. “Don’t you fall asleep, you son of a bitch,” he said aloud. Then he drew back his hand and slapped his own face as hard as
he could. The inner wall of his cheek was cut on a tooth and he tasted his own blood.
“Brewer, I’m going to get you.”
But Brewer stubbornly refused to arrive. By two, McCall had to reassure himself. He reestimated Brewer’s average speed and calibrated an arrival time of 4:00 A.M. Two hours to go.
At three he discovered an error in his calculations and revised the time of arrival to 5:00 A.M. Still two hours to go.
He went into long reveries now, recalling his father. The broken hockey stick. He envied Borden, who was sound asleep in his hotel room. Then he heard the long falling scream of the Flying Tumbler. He was wide-awake. It was five o’clock. And no Brewer.
The tarot deck and the falling Tumbler were a long way back down the road.
He got out of the car and strolled up and down, up and down, for the hundredth time that night. A group of trucks arrived. Italian and Spanish plates.
He had been beaten. There was no night caravan. He’d guessed wrong. The fox had fooled him once again. Somewhere in Turkey, Brewer must have switched everything to trucks—or planes or balloons.
McCall realized with a start that it was the morning of November 26. He had been so intent on Brewer he’d forgotten about the three other assassinations. Today was the day.
McCall got into his car and started the engine. He fought off a wave of despair. As if to mock him, two more trucks and a car arrived. Almost as a reflex action, he put the binoculars on the car—an old red Renault with a French license plate.
Bingo.
Getting the binary explosive into Cairo was the easy part. Rock shipped it in two packages, inside new copies of the Koran published in Damascus. They were air-freighted to his Cairo hotel, where he’d reserved an expensive suite.
Planting the bomb in the Royal Nile Hotel was going to be very dicey. Rumbh had really done his homework, and Rock had brought with him all the floor diagrams, photographs of room settings, and, most important, keys to the conference room. But the security was so tight in the Royal Nile, he was going to have a tough time getting close to the conference room.
There was really only one possibility—through the air-duct system.
He made the bomb in his hotel room. Discreetly then, he got rid of the cut-out Korans and other debris in trash piles in various parts of the city. By noon of the twenty-sixth he was all set. The bomb fit neatly into an expensive attaché kit he’d bought just for it in Paris. And the attaché case fit neatly inside a larger executive case, very expensively made of natural leather with white-gold fittings.
Just before he left his room he laid out the photographs and floorplans of the hotel and conference room. He’d memorized the route he would take and the precise location of the closet for the air-conditioning system.
He dressed carefully and expensively, then left his room carrying the large executive case. When he reached the Royal Nile, the doorman held the cab door open for him and he stepped into the coolness of the glassed-in lobby. The kiss-and-tell conference was set to commence at 3:00 P.M. and already the lobby was awash with government security men, Cairo police, and representatives of both sides who would make their own final checks.
All eyes were on Rock’s attaché case as he crossed to the elevator. A security man stepped on the elevator with Rock and pretended to read his newspaper. The man watched Rock get off on the sixth floor. He held the elevator door open with his foot as he watched Rock walk down the corridor. Rock stopped at 612, put a key in the lock, and entered the room. He waited there for fifteen minutes.
At twelve-thirty Rock walked down the stairway to the conference floor. He strolled down the carpeted hallway, past the two entrances to the conference room, and turned at the corner. There was a security man at each door, and inside, through a partly open door, he saw several men setting up chairs around a large conference table.
The air-conditioning system was closeted behind two latticed doors. He could feel the hum of the massive unit when he put the key in one of the doors. It turned; the door opened; he stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind him. Halfway home. He took out a pencil flashlight and aimed it up at the wall behind the unit. By stretching his head up, he could see through the wall opening under the main duct. He saw little slits of light coming through the wall from the conference room around an air outlet.
Voices came down the corridor toward him. They drew closer: two men, one with a two-way radio unit. They paused before the doors of the air-conditioning system. Rock had not locked it behind him. If they opened that door, Rock was a dead man—possession of that bomb would put him right in front of an Egyptian firing squad. One of the men gripped the door handle and turned it. The door opened. Light from the hallway fell in a vertical stripe on Rock’s form. The two voices discussed this. Then the door was shut; a key was inserted in the lock and turned. The two men walked away.
Rock told himself to hurry. With both hands he reached the attaché case up and through the opening in the wall under the air duct. It just fit. With his right arm extended, he reached the case up against the conference room wall and left it resting upright against the side of the air duct. Surely any idiot would find that. It stuck out like a bull fiddle in a phone booth. The bomb was set to go off at precisely five o’clock.
With his key Rock unlocked the door of the closet and stepped into the hallway. This time he walked away from the conference room to another stairway and walked back up to the sixth floor. There he summoned the elevator and took it down to the lobby, carrying the empty executive case.
He crossed the lobby and got into a taxi. Then he relaxed. It had been a piece of cake after all.
Before Rock had left the building, the closet door was unlocked. An arm reached in and retrieved the attaché case. Two brown hands opened it and, with great care, lifted out the bomb from the case. The hands then deftly fitted the bomb into a child’s schoolbook knapsack. On the blue canvas fabric of the knapsack were printed in white the initials UCLA.
Now came the one part of the operation Slane didn’t like. The ship was less than twenty miles off the coast of the Leeward Island Free State. In an hour and a half, he would wade through the surf with his troops, dash up on the beach, and commandeer a taxicab which would carry him to the presidential palace.
In the original event the President had been picked up by his cousin, who owned the cab, and carried to the palace concealed in the trunk of the vehicle. That was the part Slane didn’t like. He had a premonition he would die in there, gasping for air. Everyone had assured him there was plenty of ventilation in the trunk but he was still apprehensive.
And in recent nights he had dreamed of his first murder. Carson was his name. It was the only killing that had ever bothered him, probably because it was the one that had carried him over that forbidden line from which there was no turning back. It was the irrevocable act. And Carson had died badly, shouting at him, terrified of death, a man with fears of damnation.
His words had come back to Slane many times. “There is a hell, Slane, and that’s where you’re going.”
Just before dawn the ship turned toward shore as the mercenaries began working the fittings of the landing craft. Slane told himself that after the ride in the taxicab trunk, everything would be all right.
Peno Rus slept fitfully. The seminar was going splendidly. There had been nothing but praise from the attendees. Word had gotten out as Rus had intended, and already other arms buyers from all over were calling to sign up for the next seminar. Rus had said to Major Mudd in jest: “We may have to start our own war college, Mudd, as a rival to Sandhurst.” But there was a real possibility that they would have to form a permanent program of some sort.
Yet, each day brought new surprises. Rus had kept careful notes and in the next seminar there were many things he would do differently. What kept his sleep so fitful was his apprehension that before the seminar ended he would make a major gaffe. So he woke and reviewed the scheduled events in his mind, made notes, and went back to sleep, on
ly to wake again and make more notes.
At 2:00 A.M. he woke and wrote, “Make a large chart of the Morston military maneuver for Schmidt’s talk.”
Then he listened to the slow-paced breathing of the young man beside him and drifted off into sleep again.
16
The streets of Damascus were full of soldiers. Truckloads of armed infantrymen drove up and down the rainy avenues. It was the second limited alert within a week, and the civilians seemed as bored with it as the military did. They barely glanced at the olive-drab vehicles that struggled through the narrow, winding ways.
Earlier in the day the sun had appeared briefly through the clouds to strike the minarets of the holy Umayyad Mosque on the northeastern outskirts of the city. Then the clouds had closed in once more, and a steady autumn rain commenced.
The Fat Man, Georges, sat in the coffeehouse across from the car dealer’s garage, smoking and watching the rain. He waited to read his fate in the number of his cars that would arrive. Like giant tin tea leaves.
He drained the last of the coffee from his cup and scooped the quarter inch of residual sugar into his mouth with his forefinger. He would count himself fortunate to lose only eight cars. Six would surely have been detected. He signaled for another cup of coffee.
Idly, his tongue probed again the three new empty spaces among his teeth, deftly touching the sunken hole in each space in the still-tender gums. He remembered the loud crack each tooth had made, torn from the gums by the dentist’s rocking extraction tool. And all the while the dentist’s suppressed sighs of horror.
“Oh, monsieur. Your mouth. A catastrophe. [Crack!] Three extractions. Five root canals. And seventeen fillings. [Crack!] Oh, monsieur, what an unnecessary waste. Fourteen years of neglect is a tragedy. [Crack!] You must never, never, never [drill, drill, drill] neglect your teeth like this again. Never.” Georges licked his sticky forefinger and mourned his three lost teeth.
Abruptly, while his mind was wandering, a red Renault turned into the lot. He recognized the French license plate immediately and sighed with pleasure: Red was his lucky color. He calculated that if just ten cars appeared, he would not receive a bullet through the head from his irate client. The tenth arrival would save his life.
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