The Alamut Ambush

by Anthony Price

  ‘So if it wasn’t me, who was it? Is that what I’m supposed to tell you?’ Shapiro grinned again, some of his good humour re-turning. ‘I’m sure you didn’t come slumming down here just to put my little mind at ease.’

  ‘I did rather think you might be able to tell me about Muhammed Razzak, for a start,’ said Roskill.

  ‘Razzak?’ Shapiro frowned. ‘You don’t mean to tell me that old Razzak’s a suspect? I doubt whether he knows Llewelyn from the Earl of Snowdon. He’s a soldier, not a terrorist, any– ‘

  ‘Plenty of soldiers have changed their jobs, Colonel Shapiro. Like you, for instance.’

  ‘Huh! Like you too, Squadron Leader,’ Shapiro murmured ironically. ‘And I don’t doubt we shall both live to regret it. But Razzak’s been in Paris – is that supposed to be a suspicious alibi?’

  What was downright odd, if not suspicious, was that these two old enemies each discounted the other’s guilt. At the very least, and whatever they might think privately, they ought to be doing each other as much mischief as they could.

  ‘Being in Paris doesn’t clear him any more than being on the spot makes an assassin of you, Colonel. You’ve both got dogs to do your barking for you.’

  ‘And you think Razzak may have loosed his dogs?’

  ‘I think I don’t share your low opinion of Colonel Razzak. And I don’t really know what his style is.’

  Shapiro waved his hand impatiently. ‘Style – I tell you, that’s a lot of balls. I know the man, and I tell you he’s not – ‘ He broke off abruptly as the waiter materialised in front of them, beer jug at the ready. Roskill reached forward to cover his empty tankard with his hand, but this time the man spoke instead of pouring.

  ‘Phone in the back room for you, Jake,’ he said familiarly, indicating the back room’s direction with his thumb. ‘Urgent.’

  ‘It’s always bloody urgent,’ Shapiro complained. ‘Thanks, Shabby. Look after mv friend.’

  Before Roskill could protest, a slender stream of beer frothed into his tankard. Shapiro eased himself out from behind the table, but turned back towards him before he had taken two steps. He looked down at Roskill.

  ‘You’re always off target about Razzaik – and me. I don’t have a low opinion of him at all. For a Gyppo he’s quite a guy – he’s quite a guy by any standard. You wait till I get back.’

  Roskill watched him bulldoze across the room. Everyone seemed to know him and on his triumphal progress towards the back room he contrived to kiss the two prettiest girls along the way. They appeared to enjoy it, too.

  The waiter smiled at Roskill and shook his head. ‘That Jake – he’s a bad man,’ he confided happily. ‘I am glad my girls are out of his reach, safe at home.’

  He filled Shapiro’s tankard – Roskill hadn’t seen it being emptied, but empty again it undoubtedly was. ‘Say – do you want something to eat? The egg and aubergine’s special tonight– or the stuffed tomatoes, maybe? On the house, anything you want, yes?’

  Roskill was torn between hunger and a faint queasiness deep down which told him that he’d already drunk well but not too wisely on an empty stomach.

  ‘Cottage cheese fritters – or if you’re not really hungry, maybe a slice of honeycake?’

  The mention of fritters and honeycake reinforced the shrinking feeling. In any case, if he started to eat now the night would develop into a carouse, and the morning after would be a purgatory when the clearest of heads was required.

  He shook his head with feigned regret. ‘It’s tempting, but I’ve already eaten.’

  ‘Well, if you change your mind, just sing out.’

  Roskill stared down into his beer and tried to concentrate. For whatever reason, Razzak and Shapiro were each concerned to make no trouble for the other. And Razzak had even offered to get him information about Hassan. So perhaps Shapiro could be prevailed on to make an even belter offer.

  And yet Hassan, who was everyone’s bogeyman, was still a completely nebulous figure. There was absolutely nothing concrete so far to link him with East Firle, and consequently with Alan Jenkins. It was Razzak and Shapiro who were surely involved there — the bastards were involved somehow, no matter how clean the bills of health they advertised for each other.

  He nodded his head angrily. As usual, everyone was giving everyone else the runaround, and he couldn’t even think straight any more with the liquor and the noise and the heat.

  He picked up his tankard, glanced around to make sure no one was watching him, and then quickly tipped most of it among the bright plastic blossoms arranged in a long display box on his right. If it was as good as Shapiro said it might bring them to life; at least it couldn’t do them any harm.

  He was only just in time, for a moment later the Israeli loomed up in front of him just as he was ostentatiously draining the last swallow of beer.

  ‘Sorry about that, Roskill – my date got hung up at the hospital. She loves her work far more than me, that’s the trouble. But she’ll be here any minute now.’

  ‘Then perhaps I’d better be pushing along.’

  ‘Before you’ve got what you wanted? Man – don’t be silly. Besides, Rosie Halprin could tell you a thing or two about Muhammed Razzak. After we took him apart she put him together again, back in ‘67.’

  ‘Put him together again?’

  Shapiro drank, lowered his tankard and carefully wiped the froth from his moustache.

  ‘How much do you know about Razzak’s little war?’

  ‘He was a hero of some sort, wasn’t he?’

  Shapiro shook his head. ‘Not the half of it, friend – not the half of it. He was a special sort of old-fashioned, cold-blooded hero.’

  He stared out into the smokey room, and then back at Roskill.

  ‘You know what happened in Sinai? The first two days were the fighting days – the third day was Grand National Day. There was nothing wrong with their defences, they had perfectly good Russian linear system positions. It’s just that the Russians would have smacked us with counter-attacks once we were through the forward lines, and the Egyptians didn’t do a damn thing – there weren’t more than a couple of attempts at counter-attacking.

  ‘On the second night I was picking up strays – tanks we reckoned we could put right quickly enough for the other fronts if we needed them. It was all over bar the shouting, and the odd mishap.

  ‘And then I got a call that someone was hitting the junction of the roads from Abu Agheila and Bir Lahfan, just south-west of Jebl Libni – there’d been some sniping there earlier, but this was kind of determined. And inconvement, because next day we were going flat out for the Canal, as I say.

  ‘But I had a few patched-up Centurions with me, and we picked up a few more en route, and we sorted it out. And that’s where we took Razzak.’

  ‘You mean Razzak organised a counter-attack?’

  ‘It wasn’t much of a counter-attack – more a forlorn hope. He’d scratched together a handful of T 54s and one or two S.U. 100 tank-destroyers, and there were some infantry and engineers on the run from Abu Agheila he’d cobbled together. But that wasn’t the point – the point was how he’d got there.’

  Shapiro paused. ‘I pieced some of it together from a talkative lieutenant we picked up with Razzak, and some of it afterwards. It’s quite a story – quite a story…’

  ‘I thought Razzak commanded a tank unit on the frontier?’ That had been what Audley had said.

  ‘He did – in their 7th Division forward area. But he wasn’t there when we attacked on June 5th – he was in Cairo having his balls chewed up for defeatism!’

  The Israeli showed his teeth in a wolfish smile that had no honour in it.

  ‘Razzak’s no fool. He reckoned we were coming, and he sent back a report saying that they ought to pull all their armour back from the frontier and dig in deep round the places that really mattered – like El Arish. Leave the Gaza strip to fend for itself, he said apparently.

  ‘Hell – I’m not going to give you a l
ecture on his tactics! We would have licked ‘em anyway, but it wouldn’t have been a walkover and we’d have lost even more good men than we did.

  ‘But as it was, they didn’t like it and they had him back in Cairo on the Sunday to tell him so in no uncertain terms. And he got up early on the Monday morning to hitch a lift in a light plane back to one of the forward strips. Not quite early enough, though – the field he was taking off from was one of our priority strikes.

  ‘So the poor old sod was grounded two hundred miles from where his command was getting pasted — the sort of situation every commander has nightmares about!’

  ‘But he did get to his regiment?’

  Shapiro shook his head. ‘His unit was mincemeat before he even reached the desert, and I don’t doubt he knew it would be. No – when most of the regimental brass was heading for home, old Razzak was just steering for the sound of the guns. He knew damn well what would be happening – he knew what our air strike meant because he’d seen it himself. He set out simply to try to hold us up somewhere so that some of the army could escape as it did in ‘56 – he didn’t reckon anyone else was going to do it.

  ‘God alone knows how he managed to get as far as he did. A Fouga strafed his staff car sometime that first day and creased him a bit – but he just went on walking until he met another car coming in the opposite direction, making a break for it. He took that one at gunpoint – left a brigadier standing by the roadside in the middle of nowhere. And when that ran out of fuel he just went on walking.’

  A special sort of old-fashioned hero indeed – the paunchy, pock-marked sort, obstinately trying to salvage something from the ruin achieved by the fools and the loudmouths…

  ‘He never had a chance, of course. If he’d reached the front that first night he might have knocked some sense into someone, but I doubt it. The second night was too late – it was just a gesture, that’s all. But it was quite a gesture: you know what he said when we finally picked him up? – which was when he’d fired off everything he’d got, I can tell you.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He’d been hit several times, actually. He was a real mess by then. But he just lifted up his hand and said – in English, too, he said it – he said: “You’ve shot my bloody trigger finger off – look what you’ve done!” Cheeky old sod!’

  Shapiro wagged his own trigger finger at Roskill. ‘And that’s the man you’re suggesting had a bomb plugged into Llewelyn’s car! Friend, I’m not a great admirer of Egyptians in general, but I’d stake my last shekel that Razzak wasn’t in on it. That handsome side-kick of his – Majid, is it? – he might do it if he had the knowhow. But not Razzak. If that’s what you mean by style, then it’s not his style. With him it’d be face-to-face or not at all.’

  He spoke with a sudden passion which was not really out of character; some of the biggest comedians became like this the moment they stopped playing to the gallery, and there had never been any question that Shapiro was a hard man under his clowning.

  What was out of character was not only that he was going out of his way to give Razzak an unsolicited testimonial, but that he now seemed inclined towards Audley’s contention that there could be any recognisable style in killing.

  But Razzak’s self-sacrificial tactics in Sinai certainly didn’t prove that he was capable of removing opponents by any available means. It almost suggested the very opposite – that under the layers of fat lay an iron determination unshaken by odds, difficulty and danger.

  ‘Do you get my point?’ said Shapiro.

  ‘I’m not at all sure that I do, no,’ said Roskill slowly. Perhaps it was the opposite point the crafty sod intended – to damn the Egyptian with praise. ‘But I think your admiration for Colonel Razzak is – touching– to say the least.’

  Shapiro grimaced. ‘Ah! The authentic supercilious voice of England – the lesser breeds shall not show unfitting qualities of sportsmanship towards each other! I do beg your pardon. Squadron Leader. But it isn’t simply admiration, I assure you. I know Razzak, that’s all I was attempting to show in my clumsy way. I don’t underrate him, but I know how his mind works. That was what you wanted to know, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You think we should look elsewhere?’

  ‘I’m quite sure you’d be wasting your time on Razzak.’ Shapiro gazed at Roskill quizzically. ‘Does it surprise you – my advice?’

  Roskill nodded. ‘It does rather.’

  ‘I ought to be stirring things up, eh?’ Shapiro grinned, ‘If I thought he could be properly saddled with it I might be tempted. Then again, I might not – there’s no real percentage in playing “Wolf, Wolf”. It weaken’s one’s credibility.’

  He leaned forward towards Roskill. ‘You’re wondering why I’m being so nice to old Razzak – and helpful to you. But to be honest I wouldn’t cross the road for either of you, any more than you’d cross it for me. But look at it from my point of view, friend – I know I didn’t do it and I don’t reckon Razzak did. But I know some dim-witted Arab did, and it’d suit me fine to see you nail him – and if it suits me I’ll see he gets plenty of publicity when the time comes.’

  ‘Not with a D Notice, you won’t.’

  ‘D Notice?’ Shapiro blew a derisive raspberry. ‘No D Notices in the States – or in Europe. They lap up D Notices, in fact – makes ‘em see the fire under the smoke. And with my contacts in the Commons I’ll make your D Notice look pretty sick, too. If you get your man I just can’t lose – that’s the way I see it.’

  That was the way Roskill was seeing it too – and seeing it very clearly. The newspapers had got very fair mileage out of the bomb explosion at the Zim office in Regent Street and the Marks and Spencer’s fires the year before – and even from the crazy plan to kidnap Clore and Sieff. And the air liner bombs had been a far greater disaster for the Arab cause. But an act of terrorism directed against a foreign, non-Jewish Government official would unite official opinion against the Arab cause more surely than any of these crimes.

  Except that the killers hadn’t been after Llewelyn at all; he kept almost forgetting what only he and Audley – and the killers – knew: that this was no deliberate act of misconceived policy, but something much simpler – the hurried elimination of a witness.

  But a witness to what?

  He met Shapiro’s eyes. The agonising thing was that even if the man didn’t know who the killers were, he might very well know why they had acted. And that was the one question that couldn’t yet be asked of him.

  Shapiro evidently misunderstood his expression; he shook his head sadly.

  ‘I’m sorry you had to lose a good man to give me this on a plate, Roskill. It’s a bloody waste, that’s what it is – like this whole rotten situation we’re in. Nobody gains, not us and not the Egyptians, and not those poor devils in the camps across the Jordan.’

  ‘Only the Russians.’

  ‘Them?’ Shapiro waved a hand. ‘Not them either – you wait and see. The Arabs hate their guts.’

  That was what Audley was always saying. In the long run meddlers in the Middle East only found trouble as the reward for their pains.

  ‘So Razzak says you’re innocent, and you say Razzak’s whiter than snow,’ said Roskill softly. ‘But if not either of you, then who?’

  ‘Does old Razzak say that? That’s white of him!’ Shapiro brushed his moustache thoughtfully. ‘Well, I would say the only good reason for knocking off Llewelyn would be if he was the kingpin of the cease-fire negotiations – which he most certainly isn’t. But of course he may think he is, in which case someone may believe him … so we want someone dotty enough to believe it and fanatic enough to kill…’

  ‘With T.P.D.X.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Shapiro raised his eyebrows. ‘Then we want someone who knows his way round explosives too.’

  ‘It’s as tricky as that, is it?’

  ‘Not tricky – just powerful. If you only lost one man, then they only used a very little of it. A beginner would have used too much and
blown up the whole block.’ He began to count off his fingers. ‘Not official Fatah – they’re down on foreign jobs after the last mess-up. Not Saiqa – their London man’s hot on good public relations at the moment.’ He stopped, frowning. ‘Of course they could have hired some freelance white talent – there’s enough money floating around to tempt some of the bad hats. They wouldn’t like doing it, any of the groups. It would make ‘em feel reactionary and inadequate. But for a once-only job they might stretch a point…’ He stopped again, gazing into space. ‘On the whole I don’t think so, though. If it ever leaked out there’d be tremendous loss of face. Besides, with all the training Moscow’s been giving, there must be plenty of them around who know how to handle the stuff … So where does that get us?’

  He looked at Roskill. ‘There’s the Chinese-orientated wing of the P.F.L.P. that’s never been brought into the fold. But they wouldn’t know about Llewelyn, and if they did they probably wouldn’t be interested in him. So not them either, I reckon.’ He grinned. ‘Don’t rush me, though. We’ll get ourselves a short list in the end, never fear.’

  If he was going to work his way painstakingly through the possibilities it might be hours before he reached the vital one, and he might never reach it at all. There was no real point in prolonging this process of elimination, anyway.

  How about Hassan?’

  Shapiro looked at him quickly, like a teacher faced, with a suspiciously sharp question.

  Then he nodded to himself slowly — the teacher smugly satisfied that he had seen right through the question and the questioner to the instigators.

  ‘So that’s what it’s all about, then!’ he murmured, still more to himself than to Roskill. ‘Hassan’s really got off the ground at last!’ He whistled softly. ‘That’s a thought to conjure with, and no mistake. We shall all have to fasten our safety belts now, shan’t we?’

  ‘You know about Hassan?’

  ‘Know about him? My friend, until you just mentioned him I hoped he was only a nasty rumour. But if you British are worried about him, then I’m worried about him too!’

  ‘What do you know about him?’