Mirage

by James Follett

  Daniel was surprised by Emil’s brisk efficiency. He looked up and caught the hard look in the grey eyes. ‘Dad - it will be seen by the head of—’

  ‘I promise you it will be read by that person first,’ Emil interrupted. His face relaxed into a smile as he turned to leave. ‘Type triple-spaced, Daniel. That way you’ll be able to add lines if you have to. See you at one o’clock. Good luck.’

  Daniel was alone. He fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter, switched it on and spent five minutes trying to think of a suitable title and sub-headings for the report. Eventually he made up his mind and typed an experimental heading in lower-case letters:

  a report on the feasibility of israel building its own supersonic fighters

  His inexperienced fingers found the shift lock. He retyped the heading in capitals. There was something intimidating about the appearance of the sharp, well-defined letters, printed black and even with the aid of a new use-once carbon ribbon in a good quality machine. Hitherto he had always typed his combat reports on an ancient Remington. His reports when working at Dassault had usually been dictated.

  He pressed the carriage return and started typing, gradually picking up speed as he gained confidence.

  Daniel was a clear thinker and was used to writing reports. The sub-headings he had decided upon enabled him to put everything down in logical order with nothing missed out.

  He worked steadily for three hours. The only interruption was when Jane Harel brought him some coffee. There were over thirty pages of inexpertly typed typescript at his elbow by noon. An hour later he was killing time by retyping the final page with its important closing paragraph when Emil walked into the office.

  ‘Finished?’

  ‘Just about, dad.’

  Daniel finished retyping the page, added it to the heap and handed the entire sheaf of documents to his father.

  ‘Excellent.... Excellent... .’ said Emil approvingly, skimming rapidly through the paragraphs to get the flavour of the report. Sub-headings such as ‘An Appraisal of the Facilities at Israel Aircraft Industries’ surprised him. Obviously Daniel had given the matter more thought than he had anticipated.

  Daniel was watching his father carefully. ‘When will it be handed over?’

  ‘Today.’ Emil was about to push the report into his briefcase when Daniel stopped him.

  ‘Read the last paragraph, dad.’ His voice was quiet but insistent. Emil read the last paragraph.

  In conclusion, the person in charge of an operation to obtain the drawings must be familiar with the Mirage and its documentation. Additionally, he or she must have a thorough working knowledge of Dassault’s design and drawing office practices. The ability to distinguish between essential drawings and non-essential drawings will be a prerequisite of the operation’s success. To give two examples: at least 50,000 drawings are source control documents covering proprietary components which are freely available on the open market. Obtaining such drawings would be a waste of time, energy and resources. The same applies to some 5000 drawings covering specialized testing and servicing equipment which is already held by Chel Ha’Avir maintenance units. To provide a secret agent with the necessary engineering expertise in time will be impossible. A more practical approach would be to retrain an expert on the Mirage in clandestine operations. My experience of flying the Mirage and the periods I have spent at Dassault’s plus my service on the user co-ordination groups uniquely qualify me to lead the proposed operation.

  ‘No,’ said Emil curtly.

  Daniel bridled. ‘It’s not for you to say.’

  ‘Let’s discuss it in the car. Not here.’ Emil pushed the report into his briefcase. ‘Any wastepaper?’

  Daniel sullenly fished some sheets of paper out of the wastebin and thrust them at his father. The two men checked the office to make sure that nothing had been overlooked. They left the building without speaking and sat in Emil’s car. The sun beat down on the roof.

  ‘You promised me that the report would go to the head of Mossad,’ said Daniel morosely.

  ‘And so it shall.’

  ‘Unaltered?’

  Emil sighed. ‘When have you ever known me not to keep my word?’

  ‘Therefore my suggestion has to be considered.’

  ‘Of course it will be considered,’ Emil replied. ‘Listen, Daniel. I know what these people are like. I’ve had dealings with them. I can tell you here and now what they will say. Simply that if there is to be such an operation - and it’s a big “if’ - it will have to be carried out by professionals.’

  ‘Dad - when it comes to stealing three tons of drawings, we’re all amateurs!’

  ‘I’m talking about personnel who are trained to operate in a foreign country. Men and women who know how to merge into the background and not arouse comment.’ Emil was tempted to point out that Daniel had already drawn attention to himself with his questioning of the Israeli naval engineers in Cherbourg, but such an admission would have jeopardized his cover. He started the car and merged it with the lunchtime traffic. The movement of air through the car brought some respite from the burning heat.

  ‘I could be trained!’ Daniel insisted.

  ‘That would take months.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’m guessing.’

  ‘All right then - so there’s my suggestion that they train me. The whole operation’s going to take at least a year anyway.’ Daniel

  became pleading. ‘You’ve got to understand, dad - I want to do something for my country. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life working in airline offices. I like it in London but this war of attrition is in the newspapers every day. That’s the worst of it... I’m leading a soft life while Israelis are being killed. I can’t go on, dad. It’s driving me to distraction. I’ve got to do something.’

  Emil rested a kindly hand on his son’s wrist. ‘A need to do something - even on this scale - is not a qualification for doing it. You’ve done more than most for your country, Daniel. And there’re not many young men with the imagination to have come up with such a suggestion and the initiative to carry out some preliminary groundwork.’

  ‘That’s all it has been,’ said Daniel bitterly. ‘Groundwork. I’ve racked my brains trying to think up a way of penetrating Luftech.’ ‘That’s where the professionals come in.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Daniel conceded. ‘But I don’t see why the work I’ve put in shouldn’t qualify me to be at least considered to run the operation.’

  Emil stopped at some traffic lights and looked sideways at his passenger. ‘There’s another reason, Daniel.’

  ‘My foot?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Meaning that they don’t send spies into the field who happen to be cripples?’

  ‘Well - you’re hardly a cripple, Daniel. But your limp would—’ Daniel gave an unexpected chuckle. ‘I would have thought that if they never send cripples into the field, then that’s a bloody good reason for using one.’

  Emil was startled by his son’s lateral thinking.

  It was the lateral thinkers who rose to the top in Mossad.

  Furthermore, it was a very good point.

  4

  It was a standing order in the Ministry of Defence that sensitive documents were locked in the strongrooms at night so that individual offices could be left unlocked for cleaners.

  Jacob entered Emil’s ‘cover’ office at 4.00pm. He looked carefully around. It was exactly the same as it had always been. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed. The wastepaper bin was empty and the filing cabinet was filled with internal memos as usual.

  But there was one significant difference: the Adler’s dust cover was lying beside the typewriter. Jane Harel was right - Daniel had been typing. But what and why? Jacob sat at the desk and stared at the machine as though it might answer the questions crowding into his mind. What was Daniel Kalen doing back in Israel and why should Emil want his son to use a typewriter?

  Maybe there was a scrap of paper
jammed under the roller? It did not seem very likely but it was worth a look. Mindful of his manicured nails, Jacob pulled up the type basket cover. There was nothing there nor was a hint of the real reason for Daniel’s visit in any of the desk drawers. Even the sheets of carbon paper were unused. Jacob dropped the dust cover in place on the typewriter and left. He had a nagging feeling at the back of his mind that there was something vital he had overlooked.

  5

  Emil stopped the car outside Lod Airport’s departure terminal and shook hands with Daniel.

  ‘Goodbye, Daniel. And don’t forget an occasional letter to Leonora.’

  ‘You will let me know what happens?’

  Emil smiled. ‘If I send you telexes about the new plantation, you’ll know what I’m talking about. But it might be some weeks. So you go back to your job and forget all this until I get in touch. Okay?’ Emil watched his son disappear in the terminal before starting the engine and heading back to Tel Aviv. He went straight back to his office at the Institute and immersed himself in clearing a backlog of work. The escalating War of Attrition meant that the resources of Mossad were being stretched to the utmost. It was not until 6.00pm, when the building was emptying, that he had a chance to study Daniel’s report in detail.

  What he read shook him. Daniel’s typescript turned out to be one of the most carefully worded, well thought-out reports that he had come across in a long time. The first few pages were a detailed account of the trip to Cherbourg and Winterthur. Daniel had even inserted a note that read:

  ... Talking to our personel at Cherbourg was a calculated risk which I had to take because I was recognized by an old friend, Joe Tyssen, who is a member of the naval team supervising the construction of the boats. If our security is as good as it should be, presumably my encounter with the naval group was reported ...

  Emil was impressed. He was even more impressed when he came to Daniel’s suggestion for getting the drawings back to Israel. It was brilliantly simple. Daniel had an unsuspected intuitive flair when it came to security matters. Equally impressive was Daniel’s appraisal of the short-term and long-term advantages of obtaining the Mirage drawings. In the short-term Israel Aircraft Industries and its subcontractors would be able to make an immediate start on the manufacture of urgently needed spares for the existing aircraft. Daniel even suggested that these drawings should be obtained first so that at least something worthwhile could be salvaged from the operation should it go seriously wrong and have to be aborted. Daniel’s long-term analysis was to point out the obvious advantages of Israel being able to produce its own supersonic jet.

  Even if we do not secure all the drawings of the airframe, we should make every effort to obtain the Atar jet engine drawings. In many respects developing a suitable power unit is more of a problem than building an airframe from scratch. If we do have to develop our own airframe, possession of a complete set of Atar drawings and specifications will reduce the lead time to get such a fighter into service by at least three years. In my experience, jet engine drawings are rarely subject to the same security strictures as airframe drawings. This is because jet engines often have civil applications to defray the huge costs of their development ...

  The closing pages of the report covered Winterthur; a thumbnail outline of a German-speaking medieval village that had become an industrial town due to the enterprise and energy of the Sulzer family. Daniel surmised that the town’s lack of a Jewish community was due to its emphasis on engineering rather than those trades that traditionally attracted Jews. He had even pursued a pessimistic line with a few notes on the Swiss judicial system and the relatively moderate sentences handed out by the courts for espionage convictions.

  Emil read through the report again and sat for some minutes deep in thought. Daniel’s effort was all the more notable because it had been written straight off without the aid of notes. There was one serious error of judgement: Daniel had built too much on his chance sighting of a Mirage under canvas outside Luftech. From this one isolated incident he had assumed that security at Luftech and Sulzers was lax. Emil knew better from his attempts to obtain information on the activities of former Nazis in Switzerland. The big companies such as La Roche, Brown Bouverie and Ciba were as tight as clams. Luftech would be no different. The chances were that the board of directors was made up of high-ranking reservists in the Swiss army. Although Switzerland welcomed people of all nationalities to live within her borders provided they had money and behaved themselves, it was nonetheless one of the most insular countries in the world. Its banks, large companies and financial institutions were harder to penetrate than the Kremlin.

  Despite this oversight, Daniel’s report was surprisingly complete for an initial appraisal. Although no costings were given - obviously because a modus operandi had not been thought out apart from a clever idea to get the drawings out of Switzerland - it was the sort of report that Emil would have expected from an experienced operative.

  The distant thunder of jet engines distracted him while he was trying to make up his mind what to do about the report. From his sixth floor office he could see across the rooftops of Tel Aviv to the sea. He squinted into the low, late evening sun and picked out the silvery shape of three Mirages skimming low across the water towards Haifa. Such hazardous training flights were becoming much rarer now that the Chel Ha’Avir was desperately trying to conserve its precious fighters.

  Emil came to a decision. There was only one man in Israel who should see the report at this stage. He wrote a brief note which he sealed in an inter-departmental envelope together with Daniel’s typescript. He marked the envelope for the eyes of Levi Eshkol only and left his office. Twenty minutes later he was driving towards Jerusalem.

  He would deliver the envelope personally to the Prime Minister’s private secretary.

  6

  LONDON

  Ian McNaill was not a happy man.

  Two lots of bad news had come his way this morning. The first had been his bathroom scales advising him he had gained three pounds during the past week. The second helping of bad news was from Raquel telling him that she had lost Daniel in Winterthur and had got through nearly five hundred pounds in expenses in the same week.

  He lowered his coffee cup and regarded her sorrowfully across the Wimpy bar’s crimson-topped table. He had never seen her so elegantly dressed: a beautifully finished coffee and white pleated skirt with matching top that had to have an expensive label.

  ‘How much, Miss Gibbons?’

  Raquel pushed a fistful of receipts across the table. They were accompanied by a glare of defiance. ‘Four hundred and seventy pounds, twelve shillings and fourpence, Mister McNaill.’

  McNaill sighed. ‘And the sum total of this vast expenditure by the long-suffering American taxpayer is that you lost Daniel Kalen in Winterthur?’

  Raquel controlled her temper. ‘Listen, Mr McNaill, I’ve had four days of chasing across Europe - following someone I happen to care about very much. I hated doing it but I did it to the best of my ability. And I kept you informed as best I could. To make matters worse, I had to do the chasing in a car that’s about as inconspicuous as a fairground carousel in a cemetery. What do you give your men when they’re following real spies? One of those pink Morris Minors with a giant bar of Camay soap on the roof? Citroën vans complete with giant inflatable Michelin men sitting on the roof?’

  McNaill’s chins wobbled when he laughed. ‘Honey. You did very well. Better than I thought you would.’

  ‘Thank you, Mister McNaill. But no more. Okay?’

  ‘But you sure got through some money.’

  Raquel shrugged. ‘I couldn’t change the car so I changed myself. If you want the clothes back—’

  ‘Keep them,’ said McNaill, waving a pudgy hand dismissively. ‘Any idea what might’ve happened to Daniel after you lost him in

  Winterthur? Did he give an idea of anything that might be interesting him?’

  Raquel shook her head. ‘No - nothing. That’s
what I don’t understand. Maybe he was just touring around. But he didn’t stop to look at anything, and if he was touring, why head straight for a dead and alive dump like Winterthur? What’s in Winterthur?’

  ‘What indeed?’ McNaill murmured. ‘Okay, honey. You return to your normal work and let me know when Daniel shows.’

  7

  JERUSALEM

  Emil was shown into Levi Eshkol’s office at 10.30am sharp. The politician waved him to a chair. Daniel’s report was lying on his desk.

  ‘I’ve read it through three times,’ said Eshkol, coming straight to the point after the briefest of opening pleasantries. ‘A brilliant notion, Emil. Brilliant. Unfortunately, with no suggestions on how to carry out such an operation, that’s all it is at the moment - a notion.’

  ‘Do you think we should proceed with it, sir?’

  Eshkol gave his visitor a puzzled look. ‘You’re slipping, Emil. Normally when you come to me with a proposal, you have everything cut and dried. All the details worked out.’ He gestured at the report. ‘A neat piece of intelligence reporting but, apart from an ingenious idea for getting the drawings out of Switzerland, there’s nothing concrete there. And the analyis at the end is self-evident, of course. You’ve come to me saying what a marvellous idea it would be for us mice to hang a bell around pussy’s neck and that’s all.’

  Emil shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He had guessed that Eshkol would react in this manner. ‘There’re several reasons why I’ve come to you at this stage, sir,’ he said, taking care not to sound defensive. ‘Firstly, this sort of operation would be the biggest thing we’ve ever tackled. The preliminary planning alone would cost several thousand dollars and would need Cabinet approval.’ Eshkol pointed at the report. ‘But this suggests that you’ve already made a serious start. And spent a good deal of money.’ ‘No, sir. That report was prepared by an amateur. He did the whole thing on his own initiative and at his own expense.’