Reprisal

by Ian Barclay

  Dartley nudged Gottlieb.

  Skippy was in a nearby bush, hind leg raised, urinating against the fins of a Cobra 2000 guided missile.

  The woman came back to search for the dog. “Skippy! Here Skippy!”

  Dartley’s hand slid inside his jacket.

  The terrier finished with the missile and trotted back onto the path to answer the old lady’s calls.

  Gottlieb eyed Dartley’s hand easing its grip on the Colt .45 automatic inside his jacket. He asked, “Would you have shot them?”

  “If they had seen something and then refused to sit beside us and keep still, of course I’d have shot them. Be a kindness to them both perhaps—sending them out together unexpectedly. Funny how something like a fucking little dog can easily cause a thing like that.”

  Gottlieb raised a hand for him to listen to the radio. After a while, the Israeli said, “You understood? The king has already gone aboard his yacht. He left on a navy launch from the port area an hour ago. No word on Ahmed Hasan.”

  “He won’t keep the king waiting too long for lunch.”

  They looked at their watches—seven minutes to ten—and stirred on the bench under the increasingly intense rays of the sun.

  Dartley was calm but tense. He had been up since dawn, and everything so far had gone smoothly. He had met Gottlieb at seven. They had set up the three missiles in the shrubs and bushes of the hotel garden after eight, when Dartley had gotten hard information from Michelle by phone that the Egyptian president’s only onshore function was to be photographed taking a swim on Aqaba’s beach.

  He was doing this to promote tourism to Aqaba, it was announced. Dartley wondered who the hell would want to visit a beach because Ahmed Hasan had been there. These photos would be about as good an ad as if they’d invited Colonel Muammar al-Qaddifi or Fidel Castro. Maybe the ads would go down big in Iran.

  Michelle said a navy launch would pick Hasan up on the beach in front of the Coral Beach Hotel to take him in his swimming trunks for lunch with the king aboard the royal yacht. Dartley and Gottlieb were down the beach a ways, beyond the ring of tight security forming around the Coral Beach Hotel.

  Dartley left Gottlieb to babysit the three missiles at nine and drove to the airport in the Peugeot. The English pilot was with the Lear as promised. He was warming the engines up already and would be set to go in half an hour. On the way back to the bench in the hotel beach garden, Dartley checked the location of the backup car. It was where Michelle said it would be—two blocks from the beach, a blue Honda. Gottlieb had nothing to report when Dartley got back. Since then he had been sitting in the sun, and nothing more serious had disturbed the peace than Skippy the terrier.

  The Peugeot was fifty yards behind them, parked on the side of the road. The two men each packed a Colt .45 automatic. The three guided missiles squatted on their fins in the bushes, their warheads pointing out to sea. All three were wired by separation cables to a junction box, which in turn was connected to the aiming unit, hidden directly behind Dartley’s position on the bench in a small bush with waxy green leaves and pinkish cream flowers.

  All they could do was wait.

  At 10:30 a motorcade arrived outside the Coral Beach Hotel. Ten minutes later, there was a lot of fuss on the beach, with a helicopter hovering overhead. Then a big naval launch, with a heavy machine gun mounted on its foredeck, made its way across the water to the beach.

  Gottlieb nodded to Dartley in a satisfied way.

  “Looks like an old converted torpedo boat,” Dartley said, staring out to sea at the launch. “She’ll be fast, but too heavy to be maneuverable. Big enough to make a nice target, too.”

  “Hasan must be having his swim for the photographers.” Gottlieb raised himself from the bench, casually stretched, and sat down again. He lit a Kent. “Everything looks quiet here. I’ll head off anyone coming this way if I have to when the time comes.”

  The launch had beached at the crowded area and they could no longer see it.

  “I’d better get my stuff together,” Dartley said, reaching behind him and hauling out the aiming unit.

  Two helicopters came over the water and joined the third one, still hovering over the beach. These choppers were gunships with rocket pods, forward cannons and a side door machine gunner. Then the two choppers moved offshore again a few hundred yards and waited. The launch left land and started out to sea toward an area where many big ships were anchored outside the port facilities.

  “Shit, I wish I’d asked Michelle for binoculars,” Dartley muttered, and peered over the dazzling waters at a figure standing at the stern of the launch, waving toward the beach.

  “I’m farsighted,” Gottlieb said. “That’s Ahmed Hasan.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  The two choppers stayed over the launch as it went on its way. Sailboats and pleasure craft kept their distance.

  Dartley peered through the optical sight on the control box. The battery power supply had been switched on. He would need to be fast since the range was only about a quarter of a mile. He launched the first missile and it streaked off the ground at a low angle and out over the sea toward the launch. He heard its sustainer motor in the rear section cut in and accelerate the missile on its journey.

  Dartley tracked the launch as target through the optical sight on the control box, while he kept the missile in his line of sight and sent commands through its receiver gyro assembly by way of joystick control through the fine wire the missile payed out behind it as it flew. Except the missile was not obeying him! It was rising steadily into the air at a 20-degree angle, veering neither left nor right.

  Dartley twisted the joystick violently around.

  There was no response in the missile’s trajectory.

  “Must be a fault in the wire,” Dartley hissed. “Or in the gyro. No knowing how much these fucking missiles have been bumped around before we got them. I’m switching to the next one.”

  Before Dartley got the second missile launched, the first one arced down, hit the seawater and sent a huge plume of spray Skyward as it exploded at four or five times the distance of the launch.

  They heard the thud of its hollow-charge warhead a few seconds later and saw figures on the launch run for cover. But not Ahmed Hasan, who maintained his position at the stern of the craft. He did quit waving to the shore.

  “Thinks he’s fucking de Gaulle,” Dartley grumbled as he released the second missile, which tore into the air with a blast and screaming of air cut through by its fins.

  This missile’s sustainer motor cut in without a hitch and accelerated it on its path.

  Dartley sighted on the launch and eased the joystick forward.

  Nothing happened. Like the last one, the missile continued on its gently angled, upward flight out over the sea.

  Dartley moved the joystick again. Still nothing. He yanked the lever about on the control box, but he might as well have been pointing his finger to the missile for all the good it did.

  “Goddam, I’m going to grab that rifle with the scope and see if I can use it to knock the bastard out of that boat.” Dartley jumped to his feet and left the control box on the bench as he set out to run for the car in order to retrieve the rifle from its trunk.

  Gottlieb seized the control box and searched for the target in its optical sight. He adjusted the joystick hopefully before launching the third missile.

  Dartley had almost reached the road when he saw the chopper coming—not either of the two circling the launch, but the one that had remained hovering over the beach. It was now bearing down on them like a bat out of hell. Dartley saw the orange flashes from the guns in its nose.

  “Get down! Chopper! Get down!” he yelled, to Gottlieb.

  The Israeli kind of stirred as he gazed through the optical sight, like someone indicating he didn’t want to be disturbed while on the phone. Dartley saw the last missile shoot into the air—and he knew from its initial seconds of flight that, like the previous two, it was not re
sponding to ground guidance.

  The gunship caught the Israeli in the open, on the garden bench with the optical sight still to his eye and his right hand desperately flicking the joystick about. Dartley was yelling at him, and his voice was suddenly drowned by the roar of the chopper’s engine.

  Dartley felt the wind of the main rotor on his face. He saw Gottlieb crumple and the control box fall from his hands. He heard no gunfire over the sound of the engine, now almost directly over his head.

  They had him too, if they wanted. They had seen him, standing there looking up at them. No point in his trying to hide now. No point in trying to help Gottlieb, either. He would be beyond that. Those large-caliber chopper guns would have seen to that.

  The missile exploded far out at sea, and the helicopter veered away. Dartley started to walk. He hadn’t far to go—no more than twenty yards to reach the gray Peugeot. The helicopter was still up there, hovering somewhere behind him—he did not look back.

  He was proud that his hand never shook as he slipped the key in the ignition. He saw now what the helicopter had been doing—looking for a place to land in the garden. The pilot had found a spot where none of the trees and bushes were high enough to damage the rotors and he was easing the craft down. Time for Dartley to move! Even if they did not immediately associate him with the dead man on the bench who had fired the missiles, they would have questions for him about what he had seen. And that would probably end badly….

  The gray Peugeot went a couple of blocks inland, out of sight of the beach, and stopped behind a blue Honda. Dartley wanted to dump the Peugeot fast because the helicopter crew had seen him get in it and also in case there were immediate car searches after the unsuccessful attack on Ahmed Hasan. Two automatic rifles in the trunk was bad enough—but he had two Israeli rifles!

  The door of the Honda was unlocked, as had been agreed. The keys would be in the dashboard ashtray. Dartley pulled it out. No keys. He looked in the ignition. On the floor.

  He did not waste time. He slammed the car door, headed back to the Peugeot and restarted it. He’d take his chances with it at the airport.

  The British pilot was at the Lear, standing in the shade of one wing. Dartley could see him through the glass as he waited for the official to check his papers. They were handed back to him with a smile. Word of the missiles mustn’t have reached the airport yet. It wouldn’t be long now.

  One of the ground crew helped them with the plane. Dartley sat in the cockpit and slipped headphones over his ears. He wanted to hear everything the control tower said to the pilot. His left arm brushed against the solid bulk of the Colt .45 automatic inside his jacket.

  “Where to?” the pilot asked casually.

  “Cairo.”

  The pilot gave the control tower their flight destination in English and was cleared for takeoff, also in English.

  “Allah yisallmak,” the air traffic controller said. May Allah keep you safe.

  Over the Sinai, Dartley had the pilot change course for Alexandria, Egypt’s second largest city, on the Mediterranean. He figured he might be subjected to less scrutiny there than at Cairo. People were gathered around those with transistors at Alexandria’s airport to listen to the news about the attack on Ahmed Hasan at Aqaba when they arrived. The Egyptian president had already accused the Americans and Israelis of a joint conspiracy against him and pointed out that Allah had triumphed in saving him from these agents of evil. Hasan’s subjects at the airport did not show any great joy at his escape from death. In Dartley’s opinion, they showed a very healthy interest in the prospect of their president’s destruction. No one at the airport’s control tower or security or immigration apparently made any connection between this Lear jet arriving from Aqaba a couple of hours after the assassination attempt. It was an Arab jet, traveling from one Arab country to another with a foreign journalist as its passenger. All the same, Dartley was glad he had come here instead of Cairo, where controls would probably have been much tighter.

  He hired a car from Hertz under the name of Fairbairn Draper and drove along the Corniche, where the luxury apartment houses and hotels fronted on the Mediterranean. He could have been on the French Riviera rather than in Egypt so far as these surroundings went. He followed the sweeping, crescent seafront, glancing out to sea from time to time at the cruise ships, fishing boats and naval frigates. He had had enough of boats for a while.

  Why hadn’t that control box worked for the guided missiles? Dartley knew enough about sophisticated armaments to accept that the more technologically advanced they were, the more things that went wrong with them. Probably some break in some damn microscopic wire in a microcircuit array less than the size of a fingernail. Someone might have dropped the control box. Or left it out in the sun too long. Hell, no, the Cobra was manufactured in Germany according to military specifications. Things didn’t go wrong with something like that all that easily. If only he had tested the weapon when he had fired the rifles and pistols early in the morning—he had left the Colt .45 behind him in the Lear, hidden under his seat, not wanting to risk taking it through customs. But he knew he had made the correct decision early that morning. Either a guided missile works or it doesn’t. It had to be taken on faith. He could not have endangered the whole mission by test-firing a weapon powerful enough to register on military surveillance equipment, let alone be seen exploding by ground observers ten miles away.

  Such technical difficulties could have happened with any piece of sophisticated equipment. Dartley could even have believed that if it weren’t for two other things that kept nagging at his mind. First, the helicopter gunship that bore down on them had been looking for one man only. Why not him also? He had been standing only thirty yards away from Gottlieb when the Israeli had been cut down by the chopper’s guns. Any pilot would assume that Dartley too was involved—unless he had prior information that only one man was involved. Dartley had told Michelle Perret that he had not found a driver and did not need one now, he was going it alone.

  The second thing that stayed in Dartley’s mind was the fact that, although the Honda was where Michelle said it would be, its ignition key wasn’t. That could have been deadly for him if he had abandoned the Peugeot and depended on the Honda to escape in.

  As he saw it now, he had escaped only through Michelle’s carelessness. He had never mentioned the Lear jet to her, and she had assumed he had come to Aqaba on a commercial flight, by boat, or by road from Amman. She hadn’t bothered to check. As soon as Gottlieb was found not to be the American they were after, the roadblocks would go up and passenger scrutiny would become intense.

  But they had Gottlieb’s body and they thought it was his. The only person in Aqaba who could tell them otherwise was Michelle, and with typical Arab deference to the sensibilities of women, they probably did not like to ask her to view the riddled corpse. He still had maybe a few hours before they began hunting for him again.

  As Dartley drove west out of Alexandria, along the coast of the palm-fringed Mediterranean, he wondered who Michelle Perret was working for. He felt no personal animosity toward her—she was a professional doing a job, same as him. And she had not fully bested him. True, she had saved Ahmed Hasan by supplying Dartley with faulty missiles. But he was still alive and still intent on killing Hasan, in spite of her efforts.

  Were she and Jacques Laforque in on this together? Had Laforque intended that he be killed? Surely not before doing his job, which was killing Ahmed Hasan. That didn’t make sense. Yet she was Laforque’s contact. He had sent Dartley to her.

  If she was working for someone behind Laforque’s back, who was it? Only Laforque knew that Dartley was going to Aqaba. Unless he mentioned it to Omar Zekri. Would the Frenchman have been fool enough to do that? He had been fool enough to hire Omar to find Dartley. Now the Egyptian could guess that France was involved in whatever Dartley was up to. If Omar knew Dartley had gone to Aqaba, he could infer that France was behind the assassination attempt on Hasan. Laforque could be slop
py, but surely not that sloppy. Or could he?

  Dartley felt himself unwind gradually as he drove alongside the miles of sunny surf and sand, interrupted only occasionally by a town or an oasis. After about seventy miles, he came to a little resort town which looked half deserted. The wind had picked up and blew sand off the desert along its streets. This was El Alamein.

  This was the place where Montgomery’s Eighth Army made their last stand against Rommel’s Afrika Corps. Rommel had defeated the British at Tobruk, in Libya, and in other desert battles, and drove them before him as he swept eastward toward the Nile. In November, 1942, only Montgomery’s forces stood between him and British HQ in Alexandria. Once Rommel took Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile, and Cairo farther up the river, nothing could stop him taking the Suez Canal. And after the Germans had taken the canal—thereby cutting off Britain’s only short route to its empire in East Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand and Asia—they could overrun the Middle Eastern oilfields. Without Arab oil and easy access to men and supplies from its empire, Britain’s war effort would collapse in a matter of weeks; Rommel and Montgomery were not simply fighting over who controlled the empty sands around the tiny Egyptian town of El Alamein.

  A total of some eighty thousand men died in that conflict. But Montgomery held the line, and Rommel—Germany’s greatest hero, who would later take poison on Hilter’s orders for plotting against him—had his first sour taste of a major defeat.

  The German and Italian memorials were farther west beyond the town, and they were hardly the place to mourn the loss of a Jewish comrade in arms. He went into the British War Cemetery on the eastern side of the town. The names of the Allied units that had fought here were listed on the walls of the entrance building.

  Dartley walked among the more than seven thousand headstones in strict military rows, almost as if these men stood at attention forever in a parade ground in the memory of all free men. He was alone with all these dead heroes who had been sacrificed for the sake of freedom before he had been born. They were not the first. Already it was known they were not the last. Any reasonable guess would suggest there would be many more.