Ultimatum

by Antony Trew

  The Special Branch Inspector said, ‘Will do.’

  Ascher said, ‘Come on, Zol.’

  He and Levi disappeared into the darkness, moving silently in stockinged feet, hugging the wall to their right, feeling their way along it as they went. Ascher had done a reconnaissance five minutes earlier. Now he was counting his strides. Seven covered the length of the passageway. He stopped at five, crouching against the wall, so tense that the steadily-falling rain and his wet stockinged feet went unnoticed. He looked at the watch again: 4.26 am. Four minutes to go. From long experience he knew the time would pass slowly now, the minutes dragging. He concentrated his mind on the lay-out of the premises on the far side of the wall, on what had to be done once over it, thinking in terms of time and distance. While his mind was busy with this check list, he took the Maxim silencer from a pocket of his denim jeans and with a quick twist of the interrupted thread locked it on to the Mauser automatic. His fingers touched the handle of the sheath-knife on his belt, eased the cosh-thong round his wrist, patted the torch in his hip-pocket. He wouldn’t be able to use that until they’d dealt with the two Palestinians in the cloakroom. He had a mental picture of them. They were people he felt he knew quite well. He’d often seen them in the last few weeks, more often heard their voices. He harboured no feelings of animosity, no emotions of hate or anger. This was war. They represented forces bent upon dismembering Israel. They had to be eliminated. Hanna was very much a woman. Attractive, a pleasant voice, amusing at times, irritating at others. The sort of girl he could have gone for in other circumstances. Ibrahim Souref was a decent enough young man, conscientious – worried always about the girl – too adolescent perhaps, probably not hard enough, for the role in which he’d been cast. Daab and Hamadeh were the tough guys, Zeid Barakat the brainy one. Ascher looked at his watch: 4.28 am – hopefully only two minutes to go.

  In some respects the pictures in Levi’s mind resembled those in Ascher’s. For him, however, a persistent one was the big bale of carpets. He saw again the Palestinians struggling to get it through the double-doors that afternoon, lifting one side to reduce its width. Thanks to the Mocal bugs the Israelis knew where the bale had ended up. In the outer office, against the shelving on the right-hand wall, closer to the stock-room than the street. In Zol Levi’s mind there was a well-defined picture of the warhead lying inside the bale, Daab sitting at the desk near it with the firing-switch, the electric timing device clicking away the hours and minutes to noon. Crouched against the wall in pouring rain, Levi knew that he was now within thirty to forty feet of the warhead. There was one certainty. If it went off he’d know nothing about it.

  In the midst of his fear, he grinned. He would be at the centre of the ‘hot-spot’. What would his mother say to that? She was always complaining that he didn’t look after himself properly. ‘Why Zol? It is absurd not to take an undervest when you are going to that awful European climate.’ His thoughts switched to the Palestinians in the cloakroom. Though separated from him by two brick walls they were, he knew, no more than ten feet away. He wondered what they were doing. Sleeping? Making love?

  As he fitted the silencer to his Mauser he was thinking it would be better if things worked out so that he killed Souref, and Ascher killed the girl. He looked at his watch. The minute hand was almost on the thirty mark. He stiffened, tightened his grip on the automatic and with his free hand checked the knife and cosh. It would be any second now.

  ‘Whisky Bravo One calling Whisky Bravo Five.’

  ‘Go ahead, Whisky Bravo One.’

  ‘New valves for water-main now on their way.’

  ‘Roger, Whisky Bravo One.’ Barrett clipped the mike back into an inside pocket. ‘That’s the okay, Inspector.’

  Moynihan said, ‘Right. You stay here. Keep your eyes and ears open. I’ll join them.’

  He stepped outside, feeling his way along the left-hand wall, counting the paces. The Israelis were quite close, only fifteen feet down the passageway. Ascher had said, ‘It’s twenty-five feet long. The garbage bins are at the end. Keep clear of them. We can’t risk noise.’

  Moynihan had gone only a few paces when his left knee hit something. There was an appalling crash of empty tins falling on to the concrete surface of the passageway. Horrified, he stopped. He remembered the rows of 20 lb coffee tins on the shelves in the outer office of Number 41. He must have bumped into a stack of empties. But how was it the Israelis had avoided them?

  Ascher had said hug the right-hand wall. He’d done that – or had he? Oh Christ! What had Ascher meant by ‘right-hand’ wall. Moynihan had taken it to be the wall on the right looking towards Spender Street. Not the wall on the right as you went down the passageway.

  Ascher heard the loud clatter and froze against the wall. The next moment Moynihan reached him. His hand touched the Israeli’s shoulder. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ He was hoarse with repentance. ‘Barrett’s received the okay.’

  There was no time for recrimination. Only one thing counted now and that was speed. In spite of the noise made by the trench diggers, muted though it was by distance and the intervening walls, the Palestinians in the cloakroom could have been disturbed. If they had been they would investigate. The Israelis had to get over the wall before that happened.

  Ascher said, ‘Now! Quick!’ and Levi leant against the wall. Ascher stood on his back, reached up, grasped the top of the wall and drew himself on to it. He sat there for a moment looking down into the rain-drenched darkness, shifting the automatic to his right hand, then lowering himself from the wall with his left.

  Levi, using Moynihan’s back, went up on to the wall seconds afterwards.

  She knew from his heavy breathing that Ibrahim, lying beside her on the Kashan rugs, had fallen asleep. How could he sleep under such circumstances, she asked herself in a burst of resentment. The place smelt lavatorial, and though the rugs kept out the cold they did little to soften the hard floor. And that was not all. Noon was less than eight hours away – eight decisive hours. The Prime Minister’s broadcast at ten o’clock should resolve the dreadful uncertainty, but in the meantime tension was building up to levels she found intolerable. Far more so than in any other operation on which she’d been engaged.

  This was the great gamble. Ka’ed’s Final Solution. For them it was win or lose it all. If it came off they would have achieved at a stroke the seemingly impossible … the return of the lost lands … a sovereign independent Palestine … a new life and hope for three million people. If it failed? Her mind turned away from the prospect.

  Yet, with all that at stake, Ibrahim could lie there fast asleep, even snoring. She looked at the illuminated dial of her watch and saw it was four-thirty. They would be called in half an hour. It was awful of him. She so badly needed his companionship, his assurances. After all they were in love … Why did he?

  She was startled by a sudden noise. A metallic clatter close by which sounded above the distant hammering in the street. Maybe it was Hamadeh or Daab coming to the cloakroom and dropping something, a kettle perhaps? Or a cat dislodging the lid of a garbage tin? She sat up, listening intently, her hand on the butt of her revolver. She was very conscious at that moment that the cloakroom had a lock but no key.

  ‘Ibrahim, Ibrahim.’ She whispered into his ear as she shook him.

  Souref grunted, turned towards her in the darkness. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘There’s a noise outside. Quite close. I think someone’s there.’

  That brought him to his feet, awake and alert. ‘I’ll check. You cover me.’

  She heard the complaining squeak of rusty hinges and cold wet air blew in her face as he went out. She stood for a moment in the doorway before stepping into the yard, gun in one hand, torch in the other. Once there she remained quite still, waiting.

  After he’d dropped down into the passageway of Number 39, Ascher stood in the dark with his back pressed to the wall, his faculties concentrated on the cloakroom door less than ten feet from him. He was about to m
ove towards it when he heard, above the blanketing sound of the jack-hammers in the street, the slow squeak of door hinges. The noise came from ahead and to his left, and was followed by the faint scrape of shoes on concrete. Someone was moving from the cloakroom into the passageway. He edged forward, one silent step after the other. There was a dull thud behind him and he realized that Zol Levi must have slipped on landing.

  A torch flashed from the darkness to Ascher’s left, followed by the mildly explosive phut-phut of Levi’s silencer. Spurts of flame leapt in answer from the passageway ahead as Ascher knelt and fired. There was the high whine of bullets passing close by, the thud of their impact on brick walls. There was no time for stalking now, it was a matter of seconds. Snatching the torch from a pocket, he flashed it ahead. The beam settled on a man crawling towards the back door of 39. He turned his head and Ascher saw that it was Souref. The Palestinian rolled suddenly to one side and Ascher saw his gun hand coming up. They fired simultaneously. The Israeli felt a blow in his stomach as solid as a kick. He stumbled forward and Souref fired again. The impact of the second bullet knocked the gun from Ascher’s right hand and drained all feeling from the fingers. He dropped the torch, drew his combat knife with his left and threw himself at the Palestinian. He felt the man’s hot breath and stabbed blindly at his face. There was sudden searing pain beneath his left ear and warm blood flushed down his neck. He let go involuntarily and Souref resumed his crawl. The Israeli tried to stand up but couldn’t, so he followed on all fours, pursuing the noisy rattle of the Palestinian’s breath. Souref must have somehow opened the door, for Ascher could see him now silhouetted against dim red light.

  The Israeli’s mouth and throat were choking with blood. He spat it away, gasping for breath, knowing with awful certainty that he was dying, that Souref was not far from the firing switch.

  With a supreme effort he rose to his feet, staggered a few paces and lurched on to the Palestinian, grasping him in a bear-like hug.

  29

  Hanna Nasour heard a dull thud to her right, aimed the torch through the drizzle of rain and switched it on and off. In that brief instant of illumination she saw the two men, the nearest heavy and bearded; to his right, kneeling, a slimmer man whose automatic was pointing at her. She threw herself sideways, saw the spurts of flame, heard the phut-phut of the silencer. She fired three times, rose to her feet and made a dash for the coal shed. As she ran she heard shots lower down the passageway. They must be Souref’s she decided; the others were using silencers.

  She reached the end of the yard, felt for the doorway to the shed – the door had long-since gone – slipped through and squeezed herself into the nearest corner. She would have the edge there on anyone coming in after her.

  There were no warning steps, just the sound of his laboured breathing and the scuffle of hands on the cedarwood planking. He began to vomit and she realized she’d wounded him. But was it him, or was it Souref? She felt sudden panic, controlled it, moved into the doorway, aimed the torch and switched on. It was the slim man. He was leaning forward, supporting himself with two hands against the planking of the shed, his face pressed to it, his body sagging, the automatic at his feet. She held the torch-beam steady, aimed her pistol at his back. Slowly his head came round and he looked at her with glassy eyes. A trickle of blood from his mouth formed globules under his chin before dripping away.

  She pushed the pistol back into the shoulder-holster, drew a knife and stabbed him in the neck. He grunted and fell. She picked up his automatic and threw it into the coal-shed.

  When Moynihan and Barrett heard the shots in 39’s passageway they assumed it was the Palestinians because the Israelis’ guns had silencers. Using a chair for a step and wearing respirators, the two Special Branch men went over the wall at a point opposite 39’s back door.

  Moynihan sprinted through the open doorway, gun in one hand, torch in the other. Barrett followed close at his heels. Once inside it was apparent that neither guns nor torches were necessary. The red light of the camping torch, dim though it was, showed all there was to be seen: Ahmad Daab slumped over a table, head resting on his arms, his cheek on the black firing-switch. Near him, Najib Hamadeh lay curled, foetal-like, on the floor.

  In the corner behind the stock-room door Moynihan saw the bale of carpets. Ascher and Souref were sitting side by side, their backs against it. Blood dripped from wounds in their faces and necks, and saturated their clothing. Moynihan shook his head. ‘Give me the R/T, Jim.’

  Barrett opened his jacket, took the leather strap from his neck, and handed the walkie-talkie to the inspector.

  Moynihan spoke into the mike. ‘Whisky Bravo Five calling Whisky Bravo One.’ His voice was wheezy from recent exertion.

  The command vehicle responded at once. ‘Go ahead, Whisky Bravo Five.’

  ‘Give me the Super,’ said Moynihan.

  ‘Will do. Stand by.’

  Soon afterwards the speaker crackled and Dugald McGann’s deep voice came on the air. ‘Go ahead, Whisky Bravo Five.’

  ‘We’re inside at Thirty-Nine, sir. Firing switch is …’

  A shot rang out and Moynihan’s voice trailed away as he slumped on to the desk behind him.

  Hanna Nasour stood in the doorway, wild-eyed, gun in hand. As she ran towards the firing switch, two more shots sounded in quick succession. She screamed, put out a hand, touched the wall and slid slowly to the floor as if she were performing some gymnastic feat in slow time.

  Barratt stood at the stock-room door, a thin wisp of smoke spiralling from the barrel of his .38 Enfield. He moved swiftly to where the girl lay, turned her on her back with his foot, knelt down and felt her heart. Next he went to where Moynihan lay across a desk still clasping the R/T set, his eyes staring at the ceiling. Barrett felt the inspector’s heart, examined the eyes, and took the R/T set from his hands. He pressed the speak-button and asked for the Chief Superintendent. Dugald McGann answered at once. ‘We heard shots,’ he said. ‘What’s going on there.’

  ‘Okay now, Chief.’ Barrett was breathing heavily. ‘No more resistance. Firing-switch still locked. Timing device presumably on stream. Suggest you send boffins over double quick. And an ambulance.’

  ‘What are the casualties?’

  ‘Two gassed. Four dead. One missing.’

  ‘Christ! Who are they?’

  ‘Moynihan and Ascher killed.’ Barrett was having difficulty with his voice. ‘Levi missing. Probably wounded or killed.’

  McGann’s voice softened. ‘And their lot, laddie?’

  ‘Hanna Nasour and Souref killed, Hamadeh and Daab gassed.’

  There was a pause at the command vehicle end. Then the Chief Superintedent’s reply, ‘Get your respirator on again, Barrett. You don’t sound too good. We’re coming over right away. The Spender Street lot are listening. They’ll reach you first.’

  Barrett said, ‘Roger, Bravo One.’ He released the speak-button and sat down at the desk. ‘My God,’ he said, holding his head in his hands. ‘What a bloody awful business.’

  She sat in a corner, the two men watching her uneasily.

  Kagan went across and touched her shoulder. ‘No point in your coming with us, Ruth. Only upset you more.’

  She pushed his hand away, stood up, took the raincoat from the hook beside the door. She pulled it on with slow, laborious movements. ‘Of course I’m coming.’ Her voice was strained but she was dry-eyed. They went down the stairs in darkness and she allowed herself a few unnoticed tears. Oh God, she thought, why him?

  It was cold and dark outside where the trench diggers were still busy in the rain, the clamour of their jack-hammers shattering the silence of early morning and masking the sound of water which continued to run down the gutters in a steady stream until it disappeared into the drain at the foot of Spender Street.

  By the Same Author

  TWO HOURS TO DARKNESS

  SMOKE ISLAND

  THE SEA BREAK

  THE WHITE SCHOONER

  TOWARD
S THE TAMARIND TREES

  THE MOONRAKER MUTINY

  KLEBER’S CONVOY

  THE ZHUKOV BRIEFING

  Copyright

  © Antony Trew 1976

  First published in Great Britain 1976

  This ebook edition 2012

  ISBN 978 0 7090 9644 3 (epub)

  ISBN 978 0 7090 9645 0 (mobi)

  ISBN 978 0 7090 9646 7 (pdf)

  ISBN 978 0 7090 7368 0 (print)

  Robert Hale Limited

  Clerkenwell House

  Clerkenwell Green

  London EC1R 0HT

  www.halebooks.com

  The right of Antony Trew to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988