by Niv Kaplan
Natasha arrived in Beirut with Mike Devlin.
She, a Russian journalist from an obscure publication in St. Petersburg. He, a Scottish photographer from Edinburgh, her colleague and boyfriend.
The tall blonde received admiring looks from the Customs and Immigration people as she presented her papers with seductive charm and an abundance of confidence. Her boyfriend was dismissively overlooked.
Natural blonde, they learned, was a rare and exotic commodity in the Middle East.
Past Baggage Claim they were met by Fiad. Disguised as a taxi driver, he drove them to the apartment where they met Elena.
The girls hugged and kissed. Elena made coffee and they sat down to bring each other up to date.
“You’ve done some serious work here,” Natasha commended after Elena had described to them in some detail her activities since arriving in Beirut. Looking around the apartment it was obvious that it had become a hub of intense activity.
“When do we get started?” Devlin asked somewhat impatiently.
“You’ve just come a long way," Elena said. "Why don’t you two get some rest? Aziz will be here later to brief you. He asked me to hold off until he showed.”
But Mike Devlin was not the sort to relax. He prowled around the apartment scrutinizing Elena’s research tools, summary tables, maps and drawings she had prepared over the length of her stay.
“Mai-Li and Rolston are due in tomorrow,” he said matter-of-factly. “Are they coming here?”
“Don’t think so,” Elena replied. “Aziz wants to keep you couples separate.”
“Good man,” Devlin commented. “That’s how it should be. Where will they stay?”
“Don’t know,” Elena said. “He was very vague about it.”
“I like this man,” Devlin smiled. “No reason for us to give one another up if we get caught.”
“I believe that’s his intention,” Elena said, “but I could be wrong. This man has his own agenda and doesn’t consult me much.”
“Have you seen the location?” Natasha asked.
“Aziz has. He’ll tell you all about it. More coffee anyone?”
Devlin settled on the couch while Natasha went to shower. He was out cold when she got out. The girls raised his feet up on the couch and covered him with a blanket.
“He’s more than a little uptight, this one, isn’t he?” Elena remarked. It was her first time meeting Mike Devlin.
“It’s his first operation since Harley died,” Natasha explained. “He’s in charge now so I guess he’s a little on edge but they tell me he’s quite a cool customer under fire.”
“Aziz won’t like being pushed,” Elena whispered as they moved away from the sleeping Devlin into the kitchen.
“I’ll talk to him,” Natasha promised. “How do you get along with these people?”
“They treat me like royalty,” Elena divulged. “Twenty-four hour guard and anything I ask, they get me. They’re really quite capable.”
“That they are,” Natasha agreed. “A lot’s riding on it.”
“So how’s Sam doing?” Elena asked.
“Not himself, as you can imagine.”
“Poor Sam. He’s probably going mad.”
“He is,” Natasha said. “Can you blame him? It’ll be only a little short of a miracle if we find his Sammy.”
Elena looked up at her with tears in her eyes.
“I want this to be over.”
“We’re almost there, sweetie,” Natasha said in a consoling tone.
Elena wiped her tears and poured some more coffee in their cups.
“Where’s Sam now?” she asked.
“He’s in Cyprus with Lizzy and Jimmy. They have a boat. Copeland and Long-John are joining them there. They’ll be ready when we need them.”
“Good idea to keep Sam there,” Elena remarked.
“It took some convincing by that man on the couch and Jack,” Natasha pointed to the sleeping Mike Devlin. “Sam wouldn’t go down without a fight.”
“So what convinced him?” Elena asked.
“We all ganged up on him, told him he would be a liability.”
“Poor Sam,” Elena said again. “He probably can’t trust anyone by now.”
“He finally conceded but it was a battle.”
The girls fell silent for a short while quietly sipping their coffee.
“I guess I should turn in,” Natasha said with a big yawn.
“You do that,” Elena said. “Use my bed. Aziz should be here in the morning.”
Aziz turned up with two of his men the following evening. Devlin was extremely antsy by then. They shook hands all around and had a round of coffee. Aziz had several cigarettes before he began talking.
“Our target is in the center of town, several blocks in from the port,” he began slowly in Arabic with Elena translating.
“The information we got was initially uncertain but it seems to be accurate after all. It is a complex of buildings with a mosque on one end and a five-storey residential block on the other. In between is a long single-storey structure that connects the mosque and the apartment building. The entire complex takes up a full block and is walled off from all sides.”
Aziz took a long drag from his cigarette and continued.
“There are three entrances that I was able to detect. A main one from the street that leads to the single-storey structure and two side entrances, one to the mosque and one to the apartment building. All three entrances are guarded around the clock with at least two armed guards each.”
Another long drag from his cigarette and Aziz went on.
“The place is well camouflaged. It gives a sense of being just another building complex in an upscale area but when you look closely you find there is nothing around the particular area that can pose a threat to whoever’s inside. There are no cars parked anywhere around its walls, no peddlers, no stores, no markets, no playgrounds, nothing! The area around the perimeter of the complex is squeaky clean and there are armed personnel and undercover cops routinely combing the area. No one stops to look and no one gets in without a thorough check at the main gate and very few people get in at all.”
Aziz was done with his cigarette. He stuffed it in the ashtray and lit another.
“I spent the last week looking around there as much as I could without being spotted and found it nearly impossible to survey from street level. You can drive by but you can’t stop or park anywhere. You can also walk by but after one too many times you would be flagged. So I searched the area for a good vantage point and found only one place close enough and high enough to survey the complex.”
Another quick drag on his cigarette.
“It is a ten-storey apartment building two blocks away to the south, I’d say about 200 meters in a straight line. I went up on the roof and found that with proper surveillance equipment we can keep reasonable watch on the complex.”
“Can you see the main gate from there?” Devlin asked.
“Yes, you can. That is the good news. The bad news is that the side entrances are both obscured.”
“Can you see inside the complex?”
“Yes. The one-storey compound is actually a square built around an open space in the middle. I was able to see people in that middle square but obviously we cannot see what is going on inside the internal area. I figured we would attract too much attention spending time on the roof there, so I went to see the building manager and got a break. He had a vacant apartment under renovation on the ninth floor looking in the right direction. So I offered to pay rent for a month and asked him to hold off on the renovation. Your two colleagues are already there.”
“Well done, my friend,” Devlin remarked. “Now how do we find our boy?”
“We work in shifts,” Aziz explained, “until we get a break.”
“We need to know what to look for,” Natasha said.
Devlin was shaking his head. “We need to break in!”
Everyone looked at him including Aziz after E
lena translated Devlin’s comment.
“We need files. We need lists of names, addresses, photos. How else are we going to find the boy?”
“I am afraid that is impossible,” Aziz said.
“Can we clear the walls?” Devlin pressed on. “Is there barbed wire on top?”
“We may be able to climb up, but then we’ll run into armed guards patrolling the top of these walls.”
“Can we disguise our way in through the gates?”
“That will be suicide!” Aziz exclaimed.
“What about the sewer system? Are there any blueprints?”
“You must be joking. This is Beirut, not London.”
“What about the mosque? Can anyone get in there to pray? Surely it’s connected to the compound.”
Aziz hesitated.
“I’m not sure,” he finally said.
“Can we get some men in there to recce the place? See if there’s a passage?”
Aziz eyed Fiad who eyed Saeed.
“We are not regulars,” Saeed commented. “We’ll raise suspicion.”
“Can you bribe some regulars?” Devlin inquired.
“We can try,” Aziz said thoughtfully. “They’ll be risking their lives.”
“Then make it worthwhile!”
CHAPTER FORTY FIVE
Captain (retired) Malcolm Rolston was a Special Air Service veteran of twelve years before he was recruited at the age of thirty-two by the late Colonel Joe Harley to do covert work in Her Majesty’s Service.
Rolston spent most of his childhood in the Blackpool area, in Western England. They lived on base in Warton where his father flew jets for the Royal Air Force. Young Malcolm loved to watch from the family’s front porch as the jets took off and landed. The F-4 Phantoms would take off in a heap of noise, his dad, the squadron commander leading the charge, and land like a flock of stones crashing the tarmac before releasing the satin white parachutes that would guide them to a halt. It always amazed him how they managed to stop.
Malcolm was ready to join the RAF at eighteen but a lazy eye stopped him from achieving his dream so he joined the next best thing, the SAS, where at the end of a twenty-four month grueling course, he was assigned to Harley’s Brigade and sent off to the Falklands for a two-year tour of duty, before applying for officer training back in the motherland. A platoon commander for five years, then a company commander for three, Rolston had taken part in numerous conflicts before Harley tracked him down and made him a salary offer he could not refuse.
It fitted his lifestyle to stay anonymous. He never had an address other than his parents’ who had by then moved to London where his father, then an Air Commodore, had taken a desk job in Equipment Capability for the RAF in the Ministry of Defence. His occupation did not allow him to stay in one place for too long, nor to develop lasting relationships with women.
Now, pushing forty, Rolston was beginning to wonder if it was time to settle down. Being a hardened SAS veteran who had seen his share of casualties, Harley’s death shook him.
Harley was supposed to be invincible yet there it was, a fate like all mortal men.
He looked at Mai-Li who was busy in the kitchen trying to light the single rundown stove to boil some water for coffee.
Aziz had promised to come by in the morning with a supply of binoculars and surveillance equipment. They had a clear line of sight to the compound but it was too far for the naked eye.
Mai-Li had confided in Rolston on the way over to Beirut, admitting her feelings for Harley who was ten years Rolston’s senior.
Rolston, who had no idea of the brewing romance between his commander and the diminutive Chinese-American woman, was quite surprised to realize that he himself had developed quite a liking to her.
He could not tell if it was the objective situation of having her along for so long among the group of men, or if he was really smitten by her. Still, over that last three months as they waited to be given the go ahead for the mission, he had begun to develop very tender feelings and kept finding excuses to be with her including the current mission which he had indistinctly arranged for the two of them to be paired up.
Now he was alone with her in a small, confined room in a high-rise apartment building in Beirut with no idea what to do about the way he felt, especially now that he knew how she had felt towards his late commander.
He watched her move around in the kitchen, a slight figure dressed in simple shorts and an oversized bright yellow blouse which enhanced her delicate oriental features.
At the base she lived with Ali, so this was the first time he would actually sleep in the same enclosed space with her, though he was to sleep on a rundown couch in the living room while she used the narrow bed in the apartment’s single bedroom.
“Shall I prepare something?” she asked, bringing two mugs of coffee to the couch where he slouched. Aziz had equipped the place with a working refrigerator stocked with some basic provisions. There was coffee, tea, sugar, cheese, eggs, bread, some vegetables and a carton of milk. He had also managed some mugs, plates, cutlery, a pot and a pan and apparently had fixed the gas stove.
“We haven’t eaten since that awful meal they served on the plane,” Rolston said, sipping his coffee thirstily.
He looked at Mai-Li sitting cross legged on the couch next to him staring out the window, holding her mug with both hands. He was generally a man of few words but somehow with her, he felt a great need to talk.
“I miss him too,” he said to her.
She did not reply, just kept staring.
“I thought he was bulletproof,” she said after a while.
“No one’s bulletproof,” Rolston reflected. “Not even Harley, though he certainly behaved as if he was.”
There was a knock on the door.
Rolston jumped up from the couch and quickly crossed the room. He stood by the door listening, signaling Mai-Li to remain silent.
A few seconds passed before additional knocks disturbed the silence. Rolston heard voices then the door handle was tested without success. Two locks safeguarded the door and both were secured.
Seconds later Rolston heard the voices move away from their door.
He waited several seconds to make sure there was no further disturbance before he eased open the lock and looked outside.
The narrow hallway was empty. In his shorts he quickly ran through it and looked down the stairway.
He saw no one.
Aziz came late in the evening with his men hauling surveillance equipment and an interpreter.
“We don’t have any night vision equipment for now,” he apologized. “I should be able to get it later in the week but I doubt it will be good enough from this distance.”
”We’ll have to try and sneak by during the night then,” Rolston proposed, looking around the room. “At least to monitor what goes on at the gates.”
“It’ll be tricky but we may be able to do it once or twice,” Aziz said nodding his head.
“We had a visit this afternoon,” Rolston divulged attracting curious glances from their hosts. “Someone knocked on the door a few times and left. We kept quiet.”
“They could be back,” Mai-Li asserted.
“It could be unsuspecting neighbors or the superintendent but we’ll keep an eye downstairs,” Aziz reassured them giving his men quick succession of orders in Arabic.
It took another half hour to set up the telescope with its unique set of optics before the welcoming party left leaving Mai-Li and Rolston alone once again.
In the morning they tested the telescope and found they could see clearly inside the compound and along the perimeter. The mosque was partially obscured as well as the bottom floors of the apartment building on the other side of the compound. The front gate was in full view but the other entrances were obscured as well.
They decided to take two-hour shifts from sunrise to sunset. Not much happened during the day. Several people came and went and few cars entered and left, their license plates hard to de
cipher.
They had lunch from the provisions in their refrigerator and several cups of tea and coffee that kept them awake.
By evening time they were exhausted.
It went on for several days. Nothing of any real interest happened. It was pretty much a daily routine at the compound that did not reveal much. Aziz came by at odd hours bringing word from their colleagues. Devlin and Elena were conducting nightly rounds in the area and had been to the mosque and the apartment building but had found no leads so far.
Aziz was trying to locate building designs and sewer plans of the compound but so far had been unsuccessful due to the chaotic state of affairs at the Beirut City administration authorities. The chaos worked both ways since it allowed him to make his inquiries freely, almost without worry of someone realizing what he was doing and reporting it to unfriendly ears. The civil servants attending the relevant posts would look quite bewildered and gawk at requests of building plans or sewer maps.
“You would have to approach the French for that,” Aziz was told by one elderly clerk.
“That may not be a bad suggestion,” Rolston commented when they sat down for more tea. “I bet the French government still has records of Beirut archived from their Mandate days.”
“Can we find out?” Mai-Li interjected.
“I don’t see why not,” Rolston said.
“We could get Christine to do some checking,” Mai-Li suggested.
“Will she be up to it?” Rolston queried, recalling the spent woman he met at the hotel conference room in Eilat, who had swam across the border to Israel.
“Then I suggest you do it,” Aziz summed up, “the quicker, the better.”
“Is there a secure phone anywhere?” Rolston inquired.
“Over in the other apartment. I’ll get Natasha to do it,” Aziz said.
Natasha had taken over Elena’s administrative duties. Elena was much more qualified to walk the streets of Beirut with Devlin, disguised as an Arab couple out and about. Aziz would drop them off at different locations around the compound and allow them an hour or so of reconnaissance before driving them back to the apartment again. He had one of his men join them on the two occasions when they entered the mosque and the apartment building, but mostly Elena and Devlin made the rounds on their own.