by Greg Dinallo
“Are you taking your medication?”
“Of course,” the terrorist leader snapped, impatient with his poor health. “It doesn’t seem to help.”
“Perhaps I should drive you to the clinic?”
“When I return from Damascus. Should Assad and the others learn of my illness, your prophecy might come true.”
“If Hasan were here, he could go in your place,” she suggested, planting the idea of a substitute.
“Hasan isn’t ready yet. He may never be,” Nidal replied, his eyes considering the obvious alternative.
“I’d prefer to remain with you,” Katifa said, not wanting to appear eager.
“You shall,” Nidal said decisively. “Someone has to drive me.” Then, iron will supplanting the lack of insulin, he began walking toward her car.
Damascus was 50 miles southeast of Beirut beyond the Bekaa Valley on a flat expanse of Syrian desert. It was well over two hours by car from the casino.
Nidal was sitting alone in the backseat, fighting a rising nausea as the Mercedes crossed the Beirut River and headed south on the Gemayel Motorway, skirting the city.
Katifa glanced often and anxiously to the rearview mirror as she drove. If Abu Nidal prevailed, if he somehow made it to the meeting, he would voice his opposition to the plan, forever destroying it. Her mind raced to find a way to make sure he didn’t.
“How is he now?” she prompted the bodyguard sitting next to her, purposely distracting him. The instant the burly fellow turned to check on Nidal, she reached to the dash and turned on the car’s heater.
Soon, the warm air coming from the floor vent had Nidal sweating profusely. His tongue thickened, as did his saliva, which was now the consistency of honey.
They had just turned into Rue de Damas, the boulevard that leads to the Damascus Motorway, when the bodyguard felt the air rising. “You have the heater on?”
“No, the control is broken,” Katifa lied boldly, jiggling the levers. “It doesn’t work when it should and does when it shouldn’t.”
The bodyguard grunted and rolled down the window.
Abu Nidal leaned forward, letting the breeze blow against his face. But a tingling sensation was already creeping up his legs into his torso; shortly, everything went black and he slumped against the seat.
Katifa saw him in the mirror. “He’s lost consciousness,” she said with alarm.
The guard glanced back at Nidal. “To the hospital, immediately,” he blurted, clearly shaken.
Katifa made a U-turn and drove straight to the Turk Hospital on de Mazarra. By the time they arrived, Abu Nidal was in a severe diabetic coma.
As always, he was admitted under a pseudonym.
After handling the paperwork, Katifa left Nidal with the body-guard and drove to Damascus.
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Katifa arrived at Hafiz al-Assad’s villa; its limestone walls radiated the pale peach tones of fading sunlight. She was shown to an opulent meeting room, where Assad, Muammar el-Qaddafi, Yasser Arafat, and their aides were gathered in front of several large maps of Libya that stood on easels along one wall. On each, various sites for the proposed Palestinian sanctuary had been delineated. After the introductions had been made, they dispensed with the maps and took seats around a conference table.
Katifa began by explaining Abu Nidal’s absence.
Arafat lightly drummed his manicured nails on the arm of his chair as he listened. “I’m sorry he’s not well,” he said when she finished.
“As am I,” Assad declared, clearly annoyed. Syria’s president had a retiring demeanor that belied his ruthlessness. An inordinately large cranium capped his narrow face. “We certainly can’t proceed without him.”
“We must,” Qaddafi retorted, flicking a veiled glance to Katifa. “I must have a decision today.”
“You can have it now,” she offered. “Abu Nidal’s instructed me to approve the plan on his behalf.”
“Then it’s settled,” Qaddafi said, relieved.
“One moment,” Assad countered. He crossed to the wall of limestone arches that framed the windows and looked out over the rugged countryside, deep in thought.
For decades, his confrontational policies had neatly meshed with the Soviet Union’s Middle East strategy. Moscow supplied the weapons, Assad the turmoil that kept the United States mired in the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians. Forced to take sides, the Americans appeared anti-Arab, giving the Soviets the Middle East entrée they sought. But Moscow’s priorities had changed rapidly. Fueling regional conflicts wasn’t high on Mikhail Gorbachev’s agenda. Assad knew that without Soviet backing, the Palestinians would soon become a thorn in his side—the hostages more so. And he saw the deal as a graceful way to dump both on Qaddafi. But the scope of the decision made him cautious. He knew of Katifa’s lineage; knew she had authored the Intifada. He had no reason to doubt she was Abu Nidal’s bona fide emissary; indeed, no reason whatsoever to suspect she was conspiring against him; but this was no time for expedience. “No offense,” he said to Katifa as he turned from the window. “But I can’t approve this without speaking to Abu Nidal.”
“The man is incapacitated,” Qaddafi protested, his cape whirling about him. “I don’t have time for this.”
“I agree,” Arafat chimed in, getting to his feet. “We’ve missed too many opportunities.” For years he’d been criticized for backing proposals that went nowhere. This one had promise; and now that it had come this far, he was determined it succeed. “You have Abu Nidal’s decision,” he said to Assad sharply. “Act on it.”
“Not without confirmation,” the Syrian replied, with the even temper of the fighter pilot he once was.
“This is a delicate linkage,” Qaddafi complained, confronting him. “And your foot-dragging is going to—”
“Gentlemen? Gentlemen, please?” Katifa implored in a soothing tone, unshaken by Assad’s demand. She and Moncrieff had foreseen the possibility. They also knew that Damascus and Beirut had outdated telephone equipment. The fidelity of transmissions was predictably poor, exacerbated by the fact that the system in war-torn Beirut wasn’t well maintained. “Abu Nidal said we were to call him if there were any problems,” Katifa went on, jotting the number on a slip of paper that she handed to Assad. “He’s in room seven thirty-six. Under an assumed name, of course. Ask for Mr. Bargouthi. Farouk Bargouthi.”
Assad went to the phone. Qaddafi picked up an extension.
“Turk Hospital private clinic,” the switchboard operator answered after the connection was made.
“I would like to speak to one of your patients, please,” Assad said. “A Mister Bargouthi.”
“That would be room seven thirty-six,” the operator said over the crackle on the line. “Just a moment.”
“Yes?” a weak voice said after several rings.
“This is Assad calling. I’m sorry you’re not well.”
“Thank you, brother. I’m just tired, very tired.”
“I’m sure you’ll be yourself again soon,” Assad said reassuringly. “I won’t keep you long. I just wish to verify that Katifa Issa Kharuz speaks on your behalf.”
“Yes, of course she does,” came the tired reply.
“And you’re in favor of this proposal?”
“Yes, yes, fully.”
“Thank you, brother. Take care of yourself,” Assad said, ending the call.
“I always do,” Saddam Moncrieff said to himself with a smile after hanging up the phone in hospital room 736. It had been years since he’d had a complete physical. And several days before, when Katifa warned that someone at the meeting might insist on confirmation from Abu Nidal, the Saudi decided the solution was to check into the Turk Hospital’s private clinic and get one. He did so under the name Farouk Bargouthi. Of course, Assad had no idea he had just spoken to Moncrieff, and not Abu Nidal.
In a room on the floor below, the steady drip of an IV alleviating his severe dehydration, the diabetic terrorist leader was sleeping like a baby
.
Moncrieff swung his legs over the side of the hospital bed, lifted the phone again, and dialed. “Yes, I would like to send a cable, please?”
Before the meeting adjourned, Katifa suggested that that evening when the Exchequer contacted Casino du Liban, the call be routed to Assad’s villa so Assad could give the order to release the hostages. Indeed, she knew that Nidal couldn’t contact the Exchequer, though she didn’t know why; and, despite the hostages’ being under Syrian control, she had correctly assumed that Assad couldn’t either.
“Thank you, but that won’t be necessary,” Assad responded with a thin smile, surprising her. “The Exchequer makes two calls each evening.”
ALMOST forty-eight hours had passed since the USS Cavalla had put to sea. Proceeding at top speed, 200 meters beneath the surface, the submarine had crossed the Biscay Abyssal Plain and was off the coast of Portugal entering the complex range of trenches just west of the Straits of Gibraltar.
Commander Duryea scooped up the phone in the command center. “Sonar? Conn. Where’s Alpha now?”
“Bearing one seven nine, range ten miles,” Marv Cooperman reported. The patient sonarman had spent the better part of two days in his electronics-lined cubbyhole, tracking the Redfleet boat on the towed array.
“Stay on him,” Duryea said, then whirling to McBride he ordered, “Break out a brit.”
The AN-BRT1 was a radio-transmitting buoy that contained a cassette recorder and laser transmitter capable of sending a four-minute message. Transmission could be delayed up to an hour. This meant a submarine could be far from the source of the signal when sent, thereby communicating without revealing its position.
Duryea shrewdly planned to do just the opposite. He drafted a short message and gave it to the radio officer. “Set the timer for max delay,” he ordered.
A short time later, the BRT was released through an aft airlock. It rose to the surface and was carried south by the swiftly moving Canaries current.
“Where’s the TC?” Duryea asked, referring to the thermocline, a layer of abrupt temperature change between colder bottom and warmer surface currents; it acted as a barrier to active sonar, deflecting outgoing signals and trapping returns from the few that managed to penetrate.
“Three hundred forty meters, sir,” McBride replied.
“Okay, let’s see what he’s made of,” Duryea said. “Rig for dive and take her down to four hundred.”
The Cavalla’s ballast tanks filled, her dive planes angled sharply, the propeller cut a massive vortex in the water, and she headed for the bottom.
The Alpha’s sonarman detected the surge in cavitation and change in depth, and then the silence. “We’ve lost contact, Comrade Captain,” he soon reported.
“Thermocline,” Solomatin scowled, knowing that pursuit would be futile. Once lost, the Cavalla could run in sea trenches undetected. It was up to Redfleet strategic reconnaissance to pick up her trail now.
Cooperman’s sonar arrays were strangely, pleasantly silent. “Clear water astern,” he reported.
“He’s waiting and wondering,” Duryea said to McBride firmly. “Come to zero six five. All ahead full.”
The Cavalla turned hard to port, steam from her reactor driving the twin turbines ever faster. Now, dead-centered on the Straits of Gibraltar, she began proceeding east toward the Mediterranean at top speed.
An hour later, when the BRT transmitted Duryea’s message, the swift currents had already swept it more than 15 miles south of the Straits. SSIX, a satellite dedicated to submarine communications—one of five in geosynchronous orbit that made up the fleet satellite communications system—received and relayed it.
Seconds later, inside a massive concrete blockhouse at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, the ground link where intelligence from spy satellites is gathered, a high-speed printer in the message center came to life.
FM: USS CAVALLA
TO: RTS KEYHOLE/FORT BELVOIR
REQUEST PRIORITY UPDATE COURSE AND POSITION OF REDFLEET ALPHA.
LAST CONTACT 354012N/072823E. COURSE 015.
A clerk tore the cable from the printer and took it to a tracking room, where pensive technicians sat at rows of consoles, studying their VDT screens.
The RTS prefix stood for real time surveillance. Keyhole series satellites used a charged couple device to provide it. The half-inch-square CCD contained 640,000 pixels that continuously collected and transmitted data—which meant these were real time images.
The technician monitoring the sector of ocean in question was given Duryea’s cable. He entered the geographic data on his keyboard, directing the satellite’s optical system to the appropriate grid square and coordinates; then he began searching for a specific surface pattern created by a dived submarine’s propeller.
Simultaneously, a Soviet EORSAT spy satellite had detected the BRT transmission and sent the data to a similar tracking facility in Pechenga on the Kola Peninsula. The coded message couldn’t be deciphered but the signal’s geographic coordinates were immediately radioed to the Alpha.
“He’s south of the Straits,” Solomatin said. He had no way of knowing the signal had come from a BRT and, as Duryea had planned, assumed it came from the Cavalla. “Come to zero two zero. All ahead full.”
In Fort Belvoir’s KH-11 tracking room, the technician reacted to a line of side-by-side swirls that had surfaced from the Alpha’s twin props and were tracing across his screen. Though not detectable from ships or planes, the pattern was clearly visible to a high-altitude satellite and had measurable speed and direction. The technician dispatched the following to the Cavalla:
FM: RTS KEYHOLE/FORT BELVOIR
TO: USS CAVALLA
SURFACE WAKE DETECTED AT 364504N/065741E.
10 MILES SOUTH STRAITS OF GIBRALTAR.
COURSE 035. SPEED 44 KNOTS.
McBride whistled when he saw it. “He took the bait, sir. He’s really cutting a hole in the water.”
“Not to mention his throat,” Duryea said.
AT ABOUT the same time in Upper Heyford, the sun hovered low over the English countryside.
A good omen, Larkin thought, as the golden rays streamed through the canopy, warming the cockpit. He dipped a wing, putting the bomber on a heading for the air base, and thumbed the radio transmit button.
“Upper Heyford, this is Viper-Two,” he said. “Request clear to land.”
“We have you, Viper-Two,” the tower replied. “You’re CTL on one seven west. Winds are at one three five; ten knots.”
“Copy that, Heyford.”
The two F-111s circled to side-by-side landings and taxied to the hangar at the far end of the field. Larkin popped the canopy and climbed down from the cockpit. The name on his flight suit read MAJ W. SHEPHERD. All uniform badges and insignia were fastened with Velcro and easily changed.
He and Applegate had test-flown the F-111s several times since Larkin’s return from Holy Loch. Special Forces aviators served as their weapons systems officers.
A cable was waiting for them in the office when they got to the hangar. Larkin tore it open, smiled at Moncrieff s message, and handed it to Applegate. It read:
READY TO PROCEED WITH TRANSACTION.
14
SHEPHERD had been comatose for several days when his eyes finally fluttered open. He was in an unfamiliar bed, an IV sticking into his arm, the suffocating smells of illness filling his head.
Two security guards, making their morning rounds of the train yards, had found him—he was blue from the cold and naked, save for a torn T-shirt and a pair of skivvies. The derelicts had picked him clean: flight suit, boots, watch, dogtags, tape recorder, and wallet.
The guard with the metal chevrons pinned to his black cableknit returned to the security office at the gate, scooped up the phone, and dialed 999, London’s toll-free emergency number.
A short time later, a white ambulance, its blue roof flasher glowing eerily in the ground fog, came racing down Leyton Road. The clumsy-looking van went round the eig
hteen-wheelers queued at the entrance to the yards and across the flyover that bridged the expanse of tracks, continuing to where Shepherd had been found.
Shepherd was taken to The London Hospital on Mile End Road. The dreary buildings of soot-blackened brick were well suited to the tough East End neighborhood, which had been terrorized by Jack the Ripper a century before. Since the end of World War II, Whitechapel’s traditionally ethnic population of European Jews had gradually given way to Indians, who were now being supplanted by poverty-level blacks and Pakistanis.
The men’s ward was on the second floor of the main building. The glossy white walls had long ago turned a pale nicotine yellow. A single row of lights hung overhead, the illumination dimmed by the dead flies in the bottom of the milk glass globes. Forty beds, separated by clothes lockers, lined the sides of the long, narrow room. A rectangular card at the foot of each bed displayed the patient’s name in letters boldly printed with a black marker. Shepherd’s name card was blank.
Administrators had no clue to his identity. But that wasn’t unusual among the many indigents treated here. Like them, Shepherd was dirty, battered, and unshaven. The fact that he wasn’t emaciated or suffering from exposure led them to conclude he was a victim of an all too familiar scenario: New arrivals to the street were constantly being preyed upon by the bands of hardened regulars. The army of homeless that roamed the city was growing at an alarming rate; engineers were becoming almost as common as laborers. Following standard procedure, London’s Metropolitan Police had been notified; a check of their missing persons files shed no light on Shepherd’s identity.
A nurse making her rounds noticed Shepherd pushing up onto an elbow and hurried to his side.
“Go easy now,” she whispered, delighted that he had regained consciousness.
“Where am I?” he wondered feebly.
“In luck is what I’d say,” the sprightly woman quipped, before hurrying off to fetch a doctor.
“Can you tell me who you are?” the doctor asked in a gentle singsong cadence as he leaned over Shepherd, examining him. He was a rail-thin Indian with coal-black eyes and a soft smile.