Corsair

by Clive Cussler

  The woman’s cry turned into slow blubbering, as a few seconds ticked away on the grandfather clock pressed up against one plaster wall.

  “Who are you?” Tariq Assad asked.

  “A couple of nights ago, you made arrangements for us to unload a large truck in the harbor.”

  “The Canadians?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was I contacted through?”

  “L’Enfant.”

  “You may stand,” Assad said.

  Eddie got to his feet slowly, making certain Assad could see his finger was nowhere near his pistol’s trigger. “We’re here to help you get out.”

  Hali entered the room cautiously. Assad watched him for a moment, then turned his attention back to Eddie. Seng had removed his hat and glasses so the harbor pilot could see his features. “I recognize you from that night. You acted as helmsman. You know, since then I thought I was going insane. I’ve had the feeling of being watched, and everywhere I turn I see young Chinamen acting strangely. I guess you are the explanation.”

  “I hired some local boys to keep tabs on you,” Eddie said, slipping his pistol into the waistband of his pants.

  Assad crossed to the crying woman, helping her up onto her piano legs. She wiped at her nose with the back of her hand, smearing a wet trail through her fine mustache. Eddie guessed she tipped the scales above two hundred, and standing at a little over five feet she looked like a basketball in her burnt orange robe.

  Tariq Assad was no Adonis, with his graying hair and single dense eyebrow, but he had a good personality and Eddie thought he could have done better than this rather bovine woman. If not love or lust, he guessed information. She was the wife of a judge, after all.

  As the Libyan muttered reassurances into her cauliflower ear, Eddie surveyed the apartment. The judge’s home was well furnished, with a new leather sofa and chairs and a marble-topped coffee table with a neatly arranged fan of glossy magazines. There was an impressive oriental rug on the hardwood floor, and shelves for matching leather-bound books. The walls were adorned with intricate needlework of geometric design framed under glass. Her handiwork, he assumed. A breeze worked the gauzy curtains near the balcony, and the apartment was high enough that the traffic below was a low-register thrum.

  Assad patted his mistress on her ample rump to send her back to the bedroom.

  “She’s a good girl,” he remarked before she was out of earshot. “Not too bright, and a little rough on the eyes, yes, but a veritable tiger where it counts.”

  Eddie and Hali shuddered.

  “May I get you gentlemen a drink?” Assad offered when the bedroom door closed. “The judge favors gin, but I brought Scotch whiskey. Oh, and I am sorry for firing at you. It was reflex. I thought it was him.”

  “I think you can drop the act, Mr. Assad.”

  No one spoke for a few seconds. Eddie could read Assad’s face. He’d been out in the cold, in spy parlance, for a while, and was debating if the two strangers represented a way out.

  His shoulders sagged slightly. “Okay. No more act.” Though he still spoke English with an accent, it was subtly different. “I’m pretty screwed no matter what happens now, so it doesn’t really matter anymore. Who are you people? I figured CIA, when I met with you on your ship.”

  “Near enough,” Eddie replied. “That’s Hali Kasim. My name’s Eddie Seng.”

  “You’re in Libya to find out what happened to your Secretary of State?”

  “Yeah. But the mission’s also morphed into a hunt for Suleiman Al-Jama.”

  “As I figured it would. His organization is like an octopus with its tentacles wrapped all through the Libyan government. They work in the shadows, infiltrating one high-ranking office after another.”

  “Who are you and what’s your deal here?”

  “My name’s Lev Goldman.”

  Understanding hit Eddie like a punch to the gut. “My God, Mossad. We have information that says you’ve been here five years.”

  “No. My cover goes back that far. I arrived in Tripoli eighteen months ago. Tel Aviv suspected Al-Jama was going to take over a North African country through slow subterfuge. They sent deep-cover agents into Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and here to keep an eye on the government. When it became clear that Libya was the target, the other agents were pulled and I remained.”

  “So these women?”

  Goldman lowered his voice even further. “Lonely housewives of powerful men. Oldest trick in the book.”

  “And your work at the harbor?”

  “Nothing goes in or out that I don’t know about. Arms, supplies, everything Al-Jama’s brought here. Including a modified Hind gunship they bought from the Pakistanis. It was used in the high mountains of Kashmir, and can reach elevations unheard of for a regular helicopter. I had no idea why they wanted it until Fiona Katamora’s plane crashed.”

  “Members of our team took it out,” Eddie told him. “They also rescued about a hundred people who used to work in Libya’s Foreign Ministry.”

  “There were rumors of a purge when Ali Ghami was named Minister despite the press reports that everyone who left had retired or been transferred to other branches of the government. This is still a police state, so everyone knew not to question the official word.”

  “Listen, we can get into all of this later. We need to get you out of here. The secret police have staked out your home and office.”

  “Why do you think I was hiding here?”

  “What’s your exit strategy?”

  “I have a couple, but I thought I’d have a little warning from some of my contacts. I’m flying by the seat of my pants now. I had planned to ambush the judge when he got home from work and steal his car. I have an electronic device that will broadcast my location to an Israeli satellite. My orders are to get out into the southern desert as far as I can and await extraction by an Army helicopter disguised as a relief agency helo doing charity work for Darfur refugees in Chad.”

  “We can get you out quicker and safer, but we have to leave now.”

  No sooner had Eddie spoken the words than his phone rang. He answered without speaking, listened for a few seconds, and cut the connection. “Too late. Our guys just reported a police van moving into the area. They also hear an approaching helicopter. They’ll be establishing a wide perimeter before closing in.”

  “I have a secret exit from this building but it won’t get us far enough away. I had it in case the judge ever came home early.”

  Eddie made a snap decision. “We’re going to split up. Hali, stay with Lev. Get yourselves to an embassy, but not ours. Try Switzerland, or some other unallied country. You’ll be safe there until this all blows over.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m the distraction. Lev, where’s the master bathroom?”

  “Through there.” He pointed to the closed bedroom door.

  All three men strode into the room. Lev and the judge’s wife spoke for a few moments, he trying to reassure her, she accusing him of God knows what. Eddie ignored them and flipped on the bathroom light. He searched through several drawers until he found the items he wanted.

  First, he moussed his hair to give it Goldman’s curls and then sprinkled it with talcum powder so it matched his salt-and-pepper. He filled in the space between his eyebrows with a cosmetic pencil, and used a wad of toilet paper and the contents of a mascara bottle to give his face Goldman’s heavy five o’clock shadow.

  Goldman saw what Eddie was doing and had his harbor pilot shirt off and ready to swap. Eddie tossed Goldman his shirt and slipped on Goldman’s.

  The Israeli agent led them out of the bathroom and into the woman’s closet. He pushed aside a section of the hanging clothes, ignoring the increasing whine of her pleading questions. He moved a rather odorous shoe rack to reveal a piece of wood pressed up against the stucco wall. When he pulled it away, there was an open void about two feet across that ran the depth of the building. Opposite, they could see the backside of the lat
hs for the next apartment. Budging plaster filled the gaps between the boards. Above, light filtered into the void from a pair of dusty skylights.

  “This was left over from when the building was converted from offices,” Lev explained. “I found it on the old blueprints. At the bottom, I cut another hole that leads to the garage.”

  “Okay, you two go down. Hali, get our car and pick up Lev in the garage. The cordon shouldn’t be too tight yet, and with any luck the police will be focusing on me.”

  “If it is the police,” Goldman said. “Remember, Al-Jama is running a shadow government inside Qaddafi’s.”

  “Does it really matter?” Hali pointed out, thrusting a leg into the opening.

  He braced a foot on each wall and slowly started making his way down. His motion kicked up a thick cloud of fine white dust, and his weight caused the old laths to bow. Chunks of plaster broke away and fell into the darkness below.

  Goldman had to disentangle himself from his distraught mistress. Her eye makeup ran in dark smudges down her apple cheeks, and her heavy bosom heaved with each sob.

  “Women,” he remarked when he was finally free and crawling after Hali.

  Eddie followed him, but rather than descend he moved laterally for a few feet, so any plaster he dislodged wouldn’t hit the men below, and started climbing. It was only a single story, so it took just a few minutes before he was pressed up under one of the skylights. The heat in the shaft was stifling, a weight that pulled at him as surely as gravity.

  He could hear the rotor beat of the police helicopter and judged he had a few more seconds. The glazing holding the panes of glass to the metal frame had dried rock hard and came away with just a little pressure.

  A shadow passed over the skylight. The chopper.

  Eddie swallowed hard and popped one of the large panes free. The sound of the helicopter doubled, and even though he was exposed to the noonday sun it felt like he was moving into air-conditioning.

  He rolled onto the flat, tarry roof and got to his feet. The chopper was a couple blocks away, hovering a few hundred feet above the rooftops. Eddie had to wait almost a minute before he was spotted. The big machine twisted in the air and thundered toward him. Its side door was open, and a police sniper stood braced with a scoped rifle cradled against his shoulder.

  Eddie ran for the wall separating this building from the next, his feet sinking slightly into the warm tar. The wall was built to chest height and topped with jagged bits of embedded glass to prevent people from doing what Seng was attempting. But unlike barbed wire, which never loses its keen edge, the glass had been scoured by wind for decades and was almost smooth. Pieces snapped flat when he vaulted over the wall. He landed on the other side.

  This building’s roof was virtually identical to the first, a wide area of a tar-gravel mix punctured by the elevator housing and dozens of satellite dishes and defunct antennae.

  The chopper swooped low over the roof, and Eddie made certain the sniper saw his face and hoped it was a close enough match to Tariq Assad’s. He got his answer a second later when a three-round burst from an automatic weapon pounded the roof at his feet.

  Now that the police believed their suspect was on the roof, Hali and Goldman should be able to slip away undetected.

  Eddie raced for the back of the building, cutting a serpentine path to throw off the sharpshooter, and almost threw himself from the edge before realizing that, unlike the mistress’s apartment house, this one didn’t have a proper fire escape. There was just a simple metal ladder bolted to the side of the structure, a death trap if he committed himself to it with the sniper hovering so close overhead.

  He glanced back the way he came. He’d be running right for the circling chopper if he retreated, so instead he ran for the next building, vaulting the wall and opening a gash in his palm for the effort. Not all the glass had weathered the same.

  More bullets pounded into the roof, kicking up hot clots of tar that burned against his cheek. He pulled his pistol and returned fire. The wide misses were still enough to force the pilot to retreat for a moment.

  Sprinting flat out, he raced for the next building, throwing himself over the wall and almost dropping down. The next building was a story lower than the previous ones, and beyond that was the open expanse of the construction site. Dangling from his fingertips, he looked quickly to see if there was any evidence of a fire escape and saw none, not even a cable house for an elevator.

  He made the decision to pull himself back over the wall and find some other route when the sniper zeroed in on his hands. Bullets tore into the brick and mortar, forcing Eddie to drop free. He rolled when he landed to absorb the impact, but surviving the ten-foot drop didn’t mean he was any less trapped.

  TWENTY-NINE

  By the time Hali Kasim reached the botttom of the air shaft, he was covered in dust, and his shoulders and knees ached mercilessly. He promised himself that when he returned to the Oregon, he’d spend more time in the ship’s fitness center. He’d seen how effortlessly Eddie had climbed, and the former CIA agent was nearly a decade older.

  The floor here was littered with fragments of plaster and dried layers of pigeon guano. Lev Goldman lowered himself the last few feet. Sweat had cut channels through the dirt caked on his face, and the dust coating his beard aged him twenty years.

  “You okay?” Hali panted, resting his hands on his knees.

  “Perhaps I should have thought up a better escape route,” the Israeli admitted, fighting not to cough in the mote-filled air. “Come. This way.”

  He led Kasim toward the rear of the building and an area where the lath had been cut way low to the ground. Together they kicked at the two-foot-square spot. At first, the blows merely cracked the plaster. But then bits of it broke away. Goldman used his hands to tear out inch-thick chunks until the hole was big enough to crawl through.

  They emerged into an underground garage. The lot was mostly vacant, with only a few cars, usually driven by the stay-at-home wives, sitting in their assigned spots. Had any of them been older models, Hali would have considered hot-wiring one of them, but they were all fairly new and would be equipped with alarms.

  “Meet me at the exit and stay out of sight,” he said. “Our car is right around the corner.”

  Hali dusted himself off as best he could as he jogged up the ramp and into the blazing sunshine. The street was a scene of pandemonium. The shots fired from the helicopter had forced everyone to find cover. Oranges from the grocer’s littered the sidewalk where someone had run into the display. The chairs where the old men had played backgammon were overturned. Police vans were just now arriving.

  It didn’t take much acting for Hali to pretend to be just another frightened Libyan. He reached their rental car and opened the door. Sirens filled the air, drowning out even the heavy throb of the chopper’s blades.

  The Fiat’s engine fired on the first try. Hali’s hands were so slick that the wheel got away from him, and he clipped the rear bumper of the car parked in front of him, its alarm adding to the keening police sirens.

  The first of the officers, outfitted in black tactical gear, began to emerge from a van. They would have the block surrounded in seconds. Yet none of them seemed interested in anything except the building’s front door. Eddie’s distraction was working. They thought they had their man cornered and ignored proper procedure.

  Hali drove around the corner, slowed, but didn’t stop for Lev Goldman, who threw himself into the passenger’s seat, and eased into traffic on the next side street.

  Every block they drove exponentially increased the area the police had to cover in order to find them. After eight stoplights, Goldman felt safe enough to pop his head up above the dashboard.

  “Pull over into that gas station,” he ordered.

  “Can’t you hold it?”

  “Not for that. We need to switch seats. It is obvious you don’t know the roads or how to drive like a local. No one here obeys the traffic rules.”

  Ha
li cranked the wheel into the gas station’s lot and threw the car into park. Lev sat still for a moment, expecting Hali to jump out so he could slide over. Instead, he was forced out of the car, and Kasim took the passenger’s seat.

  He chuckled humorlessly when he engaged the transmission. “In a situation like that, Mossad training says driver should exit the vehicle.”

  Kasim looked at him skeptically. “Really? Doing it your way means there is no one at the wheel for several seconds longer. You should talk to your instructors.”

  “No matter.” Lev grinned, this time with genuine amusement. “We made it.”

  He asked as they made random turns away from his mistress’s neighborhood, “I am sorry, what is your name again?”

  “Kasim. Hali Kasim.”

  “That is an Arab name. Where are you from?”

  “Washington, D.C.”

  “No. I mean your family. Where were they from?”

  They took what Hali assumed was a shortcut in an alley between two large, featureless buildings. “My grandfather emigrated from Lebanon when he was a boy.”

  “So are you Muslim or Christian?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “If you are Christian, I wouldn’t feel so bad about this.”

  The report was just a sharp spit in the confines of the Fiat’s cramped interior. A fine mist of blood splattered the passenger’s window when the bullet burst from Hali’s rib cage. Goldman fired his silenced pistol again at the same instant the car hit a pothole. His aim was off, so the round missed entirely, blowing out the side window in a cascade of minuscule chips.

  Hali had been so stunned in the first instant of the attack, he had done nothing to stop the second shot. His chest felt like a molten poker had been rammed through it from side to side, and he could feel hot wetness trickling past his belt line.

  He grabbed for the gun as it recoiled up, forcing Goldman to let go of the wheel and throw an awkward body shot that still hit directly on the entrance wound. Hali screamed at the unimaginable agony of it, and he lost his grip on the handgun’s warm barrel.