Perhaps they thought they were going to be sent to Simferopol . . .
He waved for them to sit.
It was the centre of the camp. It was between the cooking area and the first line of the bell tents. He had prepared what he was going to say. In Simferopol the Russian instructors had always said that a commander should prepare his statement of orders and tactics.
The low sun was warm on his shoulders, on the back of his neck, the sun that was soon to dip into dusk behind the great escarpment of the Jabal el Barouk.
He was a changeling.
No longer the graduate and the diplomat, Holt was the technician.
He had no love in his heart, he had no hate in his mind.
The fine cross hairs of the Schmidt and Bender PM 12 x 42 telescopic sight did not flicker over the back of a sitting, living, breathing human being. The cross hairs lay upon a target.
He had no thought of his girl, no thought of his dead ambassador. His thoughts were on the time of a bullet in flight, and the angle of wind deflection, and the distance between the lying up position and the centre of the tent camp as measured by Crane from his aerial photographs.
With his thumb, Holt drew back the Safety.
None who had known him before would have recognised the changeling at that moment. Not his parents, not the men and women at FCO, not the staffers who had been his colleagues in Moscow . . . not Jane, certainly not Jane Canning.
He held the stock forward, just behind the bipod, with his left hand. The butt was pulled hard into his shoulder. His right eye was locked against the circle of the sight. His index finger searched for the trigger guard, and inside the guard to the trigger.
He took a long singing breath, forced the air into his lungs.
As Noah Crane would have done it..
"It will be a mission that will bring anguish to our enemy. It will bring pride to our people. Each one of you, of us, has known the cruelty of our enemy. We are honoured to have the chance to strike a blow at that enemy . . . "
He saw the glow in their eyes, he saw the fervour in their faces. He felt the swelling pleasure that he was their leader.
Half the breath heaved out.
Trigger squeeze to first stage.
"Wish me luck, as you wave me goodbye, Cheerio, here I go, on my way,
Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye . . . "
He hummed. The breath was pressing for release in his throat. The cross hairs were steady.
He squeezed.
Holt fired.
The path of a bullet in the Beqa'a.
"Our target is Tel Aviv . . . "
He seemed to rise up. He seemed to be lifted from his haunches and then punched forward. There was a force that drove him.
Abu Hamid fell, bursting blood, against the body of the recruit who had scored five consecutive hits with the RPG-7 and against the recruit who understood the workings of a radio.
Abu Hamid fell and he did not move.
20
The economic sub-committee of the Cabinet had ended.
It was a full fifteen minutes since the secretary had slipped silently into the room and laid the message form beside the Prime Minister's papers.
The chairman of the sub-committee, the Chancellor, was neatly packing away his papers at the far end of the table.
"You'll forgive the presumption, Prime Minister, but you are displaying a certain cheerfulness that I can hardly put down to our business of the last two hours."
"That obvious, Harry?"
"Very obvious, Prime Minister."
The Prime Minister leaned back, there was a comfortable smile. The meeting hushed.
The Prime Minister said, "One of the hardest features of my office is to exercise real power, to exercise real influence. I try often enough, and I rarely succeed."
"But this time you have succeeded?" The Chancellor was adept at the unsubtle prompt. "Can you say?"
The Prime Minister glanced down at the cryptic handwritten message. "Not yours, not mine, but Abu Hamid's, on the salver."
"You'll keep this to yourselves of course When Ben Armitage was shot dead in Yalta, and an aide also died, we let a lie be known, that the murderer was a local criminal. We knew in fact that the killer was a member of the Palestinian Popular Front. I put in hand an Intelligence operation that located the killer in the Beqa'a valley of east Lebanon. I took the decision, not lightly, to send a covert team into the Beqa'u valley in that a precisely calculated vengeance should be wrought upon this murderer. It would be the clearest indication to his Syrian masters that we will never be attacked with impunity Last night, gentlemen, at dusk, that vengeance was exacted."
"That's first class, Prime Minister."
"I'll not deny that I agonised over the decision, over the consequences of failure, for which of course I would have taken the blame, but if you venture nothing then you win nothing. This government, our government, has shown that we are in the forefront of the war against international terrorism."
"You are to be most warmly congratulated, Prime Minister."
"Thank you, I accept your congratulations with pleasure, and later, when I telephone him I anticipate receiving the congratulations of the President of the United States. We are not a nation of boasters, gentlemen, I like to think we are a nation of quiet achievers
. . . it's been a good meeting. Thank you, Harry."
Major Said Hazan was buried with full military honours in that section of the military cemetery reserved for Air Force officers who had died in the service of the Syrian Arab Republic. There was a large turnout of dignitaries and senior ranking officers. The cause of death, as announced in the Damascus morning newspapers, was given as heart failure brought on by the ravages of an old war wound, bravely borne. Amongst those who carried the coffin to the deep cut grave was Fawzi. He wore a new uniform for the occasion, and the uniform carried the insignia of a captain, and the brigadier who headed Air Force Intelligence and who was the pall-bearer immediately ahead of Fawzi, had told the young man that in the circumstances he was right to have shot the Jew. And no doubt the brave major had been so severely injured in his throat that the Jew's very first assault was fatal.
After the service, after the mourners had dispersed, after the band and the honour guard had been bussed away, the brigadier walked with Captain Fawzi to a distant part of the cemetery where the cypress trees shaded the closely-mown lawns. The brigadier offered Fawzi a job in his department, and offered him also the task of finding a replacement leader for a seaborne mission against the Defence Ministry on Kaplan. When they had finished, they walked back towards the cars, and the brigadier linked his arm to Fawzi's elbow.
"Tell me, who shot Hazan's boy?"
"In shame I do not know."
The name of Holt was not known. The secret of Holt had died with the locking of Crane's fingers on the windpipe of Major Said Hazan, with the blasting away of Crane's life by the Makharov pistol fired at point blank range.
"Come in, Percy For God's sake, man, you look dead beat."
"Didn't get to bed last night, sir, and had to be at the airport at five."
"It's been a first class show." The Director General beamed, and waved Martins to a chair, and he shouted through to his outer office for coffee, and he lifted a half bottle of cognac from his desk leg drawer.
"Thank you, sir."
"I tell you this, when I heard that the sniper chap had been caught, I thought it was all over for us."
Martins eased back in the chair. The personal assistant handed him coffee, in cup and saucer, and the Director General topped up the coffee with cognac. He seemed not to feel his age, nor his tiredness.
"Well, a fair amount of work had gone into preparing young Holt. I thought from the start, from the time I had him down in the country that this couldn't be a man and boy operation, that they had to go in as equals.
I put Holt through a pretty tough induction, toned him up so that he would be just about as able to operate on his own as in t
andem, and it paid off."
"And you had damn all help at the far end - more cognac?"
Martins reached forward with his cup. He was a good deal surprised: there was no shake in his hand. He drank. He felt the glow beneath his stubble-covered cheeks. It had been a conscious decision not to shave.
He was straight in from the front line.
"Couldn't put it better, sir, damn all help. I had to insist, lay down the law, that we should have a hot extraction programme after the snipe. Didn't win me any friends, but I had my way. I arranged for them to carry in a Sarbie beacon, and I cudgelled the locals into putting a receiver into the transport of an agent they had operating in the Beqa'a. That was the first thing I made them do, when they got windy about the chopper back-up in the first place. So, Holt fired, knew enough to have avoided detection, then he laid up until darkness, then he moved off. I had predicted that such a long range shooting would create total confusion in Hamid's camp, not much of an idea where the shot had come from. Holt moved off after dark and when he was well clear he activated the bleep. The car driven by this Mossad fellow, their agent, picked him up. I'm the last one not to give credit where credit is due, the agent did his part well, used his lights and his horn to attract Holt, took him on board and drove like hell for the border . . . "
The cognac was coursing. He felt the dampness in the socks he should have changed on the aircraft. The Director General sat on his desk, hunched forward, an eager audience.
" . . . So far so good, but of course the Syrians had picked up the bleep and were reacting, and they had road blocks between Holt and the safety of the U N I F I L
sector and the security zone. I really lost my rag, sir, I was in their communications area, and I just demanded that a helicopter be sent. Made the air quite blue, sir.
They were jabbering about missile umbrellas, all that sort of rubbish, but I won the day. Well, in the end they sent up a helicopter, they located the car about three miles short of the road blocks, quite a short run thing, they lifted out Holt and the agent. I've no complaints about the way they managed that. That's the short of it, sir."
"Remarkable, Percy."
"Thank you, sir."
From the leather box on the table, the Director General passed Martins a cigar, and lit one himself. The smoke fogged the room.
"You'll take the weekend off. Go and get yourself an ugly big pike. You'll be back here on Monday morning.
Your ears only, for the time being. For your information, Mr Anstruther informs me he is seeking fame and fortune in the commodities market in the City. Mr Fenner is returning to Cambridge, an academic future.
As from Monday morning, Percy, you will head the Middle East Desk."
"That's very good of you, sir."
The Director General swung his legs down to the carpet.
"And Holt, Percy?"
"Peculiar young man, sir. Not the easiest to handle.
Of course, he's been under strain, haven't we all? He was pretty insistent that I drop him at Paddington station on my way in from the airport. I've got the number where he'll be for the next few days. He's gone home I've got something for you, sir, something of a souvenir "
Martins led the Director General through to the outer office. Behind the coat stand, in the corner next to the door, was the Model PM Long Range. "He wanted the sling. That would be enough to remind him of Crane, he said. That was the sniper, sir." Martins laid the gun, immaculately clean, on the table in the corner of the Director General's office.
"Good of you, Percy. The Department will be proud of the trophy."
After Percy Martins had gone, probably in search of bait from a fishmonger, the Director General stood at the window of his high office and he traversed the sky line, and his eye was hard against the sight circle, and he aimed at the flags that flew from the corporation tower blocks across the river, and he followed the flight of a gull. He thought the boy was, as the Prime Minister had said, lucky to have had the opportunity. He thought he would have given an eye tooth to have had the opportunity to fire that rifle in the service of his country. He would take it to Downing Street in the early evening, just the thing to cap a damn good show. He asked his personal assistant to warn the Cabinet Secretary to alert security that he would be coming over at six o'clock and would have a rifle with him.
Together, Major Zvi Dan and Rebecca cleared the barracks room at Kiryat Shmona that had been the home of Noah Crane.
They needed only one black plastic dustbin bag. Into the bag went the second pair of boots, the two sets of old uniforms, the underwear and the socks and the pyjamas, the few items of civilian clothing. There was a letter from a clinic in Houston, there were a few old newspapers. All went into the bag until it bulged. The intercepts from Hermon had told Major Zvi Dan that Crane would never again use the contents of the bag.
He knotted the top of the bag.
Rebecca said, "Did we win anything?"
Major Zvi Dan muttered, "We lost a man who was without price."
"Not anything?"
"We lost an agent. Menny can never go back. Perhaps he, also, was beyond price."
"The British won."
"They won only vanity. Only conceit."
"Didn't Holt, at least, win?"
"If you had asked him I doubt he would have told you that he had won anything that was of value to him."
Rebecca carried the bag and Major Zvi Dan hobbled behind her. She took the bag to the corner of the camp where the rubbish of the troops was burned. With his finger Major Zvi Dan made a hole in the bag, exposed the paper, and with his lighter set fire to the bag.
A team of army engineers was set to work to dismantle the bell tents. They worked, stripped to the waist, in the midday heat. The recruits were not there to help them, they had in the morning been taken by bus to the Yarmouq camp outside Damascus.
High on the hillside above the work party was a small and unnoticed rock overhang. Under the overhang, hidden in shadow, undiscovered, lay two Bergens, and on top of one pack was a carefully folded square of scrim netting, and on top of the other pack was a single, used cartridge case.
Beyond the camp perimeter wire was a cairn of sun-
21
In the darkness he walked on the moor.
Away below him, distant and separated from him by the black void, were the lights of cars moving on the roads between Dulverton and Exford, and Hawkridge and Withypool, and Liscombe and Winsford.
The moor was his, as the Beqa'a had been his and Crane's. He walked silently in this wilderness, each footfall tested, and for company he had the deer herds, and the hunting foxes, and the rooting badgers, and the sheep that had been freed from the pens in the valley and allowed to wander in search of the new summer grass of the higher ground.
He walked until the dawn light seeped onto the royal purple expanse of the moor, and when it was time for him to settle into his lying up position then he came down from the moor and took the road to the stone house that was the home of his mother and father.
In the early morning he packed a bag, and he told his mother that he was going back to work, and he asked his father to drive him to the railway station at Tiverton Junction.
His father gazed into the secret and unexplaining eyes of his son.
"Are you all right, Holt?"
"I'm all right, it's the others who have been hurt."
bleached stones. The cairn marked the grave of a young man who had given himself the n a m e of Abu Hamid who had been a fighter for a refugee people, who had been a foreign cadet at the military academy at Sim-
feropol, who had once been frightened of death, who had a crow's foot scar on his cheek.
The depth of the grave, the weight of the stones, were reckoned to be proof against the hyenas who would come to scavenge the camp site once the army engineers had lifted the tents onto their lorries and driven away.
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