Janet frowned over the table, trying to understand the significance. “So?”
“From what Willsher told you is it obvious the Americans are planning a frontal assault, backed up by air support and whatever else from their fleet?” said the Israeli.
“I guess so,” agreed Janet. “I hadn’t thought about it to that extent: Willsher said they were prepared.”
“It won’t work,” declared Baxeter, flatly. “It can’t work.”
“Can’t work!” The anxiety flared through her.
“Even if they achieve complete surprise there’ll still be some resistance,” predicted Baxeter. “Our military people in Tel Aviv estimate that moving at the maximum possible speed—night is the logical attack time, which is going to cause further hindrance—it will take an hour from the moment they hit the beach to get to where John is, in Kantari …” Baxeter stopped, hesitating at what he had to say. “By which time John will have been moved,” he said. Bluntly he added: “Or killed!”
“No!” moaned Janet, softly. “It can’t go on like this! It just can’t. It’s got to stop!”
“That’s why my knowing the actual day is important.”
“Why?”
“We’ve decided to use the American landing as a diversionary tactic,” said Baxeter. “We’re going to send a commando team in ahead of them. We’ll get John out.”
29
Janet sensed the atmosphere the moment she entered the map-strewn room, the sort of solemnity that remains after a disagreement or a dispute, except no one looked as if they had been arguing. Willsher was in his preferred chair, at the center of the table, and the soldier who had interrupted them on the previous occasion was by the furthest blackboard, where the maps had been coordinated with photographs. He still wore his unmarked fatigues. Knox was at the window. He gave Janet the briefest welcoming smile and then looked back at the fourth man in the room, who was sitting alongside Willsher. He was elderly, with a hedge of straggling white hair around a bald dome. He wore half-rim spectacles low on his nose and a crumpled, neglected sports jacket over an equally crumpled and neglected checked sports shirt, without a tie.
The man stopped talking when Janet entered the room, looking expectantly towards her. Willsher stood, holding out his hand in invitation towards a chair opposite them and said: “I’m glad you’re here, Ms. Stone: seems there is something we haven’t allowed for.” The CIA official half-turned to the man beside him. “Professor Robards,” he said in introduction.
“What hasn’t been allowed for?” asked Janet, not sitting.
“John’s mental condition,” announced Willsher.
“His what!”
“My specialty is the psychological affect of long incarceration,” explained Robards. “I’ve worked with some of the men imprisoned by the North Vietnamese during the war. And latterly tried to expand it to include the traumas likely to be suffered by kidnap victims such as John: people who’ve spent time possibly in solitary confinement, possibly experiencing some degree of torture and certainly with captors they identify as enemies, not knowing if at any moment they are going to be killed.”
Robards had an unemotional, scholarly delivery, talking as if to a class of students. Janet considered it altogether too sterile and distant. She said: “You think John will be traumatized?”
“It’s inevitable,” said the psychologist, flatly. “The only uncertainty is to what degree. He could have the mental strength to recover in a day: alternately it could take months and maybe even require psychiatric treatment.”
Janet looked at Willsher, remembering. “You told me he could stand it!” she said.
“I thought he would be able to,” said the man, apologetically. “I didn’t know.”
“No one knows,” reiterated Robards. “I’ve encountered men built like trees whom I would have bet could withstand any sort of stress, but who have collapsed almost at once and taken years to recover. And wimpy little guys weighing ninety pounds who’ve taken everything and walked away without a mental mark.”
“Is that why you’re here, to treat him?” Janet asked.
“Langley thought it might be a precaution,” said Willsher, answering for the man.
“And I’m glad you’re here, too,” Robards said to her.
“Why?”
“Like I told you, John’s spent quite a lot of time not knowing what to expect from one minute to the next. He’s going to be rescued by a commando group making a sudden assault: there’ll be a great deal of noise: explosions, shooting, stuff like that …”
“… A great deal,” endorsed the unnamed officer. “A primary tactic is to disorient with as much noise as possible.”
What was she doing! Janet demanded of herself. What was she doing sitting here, listening to these people talk about rescuing John when she already knew they weren’t going to rescue John at all! Tell them, she thought at once. Tell them and … and what? How could she tell them without exposing herself and Baxeter? And John: John too. John wouldn’t survive the frontal assault, Baxeter had told her. And Baxeter was an Israeli. Hadn’t the Israelis done in Entebbe exactly what was being planned here: hadn’t the Ugandan assault been used by Willsher himself as a role model? Weren’t they experts, the people who knew best? The American attempt to rescue the Iran hostages had been a disaster. She had to leave it to the experts. Janet felt constrained, straitjacketed by the conflicting demands: and she felt something else, a rumbling churn of nausea deep in her stomach.
“… John won’t know what’s happening,” the psychologist was saying. “It won’t initially occur to him that it’s a rescue. He’ll think it’s what he’s been threatened with, ever since he was seized. It will be the moment of maximum pressure, maximum terror. And then there’ll be the pendulum swing, from terror to relief when he realizes it’s the Americans coming in: that’s the likeliest snapping point, that swing from one extreme to the other …”
Stop! thought Janet: stop! stop! stop! She said: “Why is my being here important?”
“Because yours is the face he’ll recognize,” said Robards. “People held like John seize upon images that mean the most to them: that’s how they cling to reality. How John will have clung, thinking of the person closest to him in the world.”
Janet closed her eyes, swallowing against the sickness bubbling up through her. Why, of anything she could have asked, had she posed a question to get an answer like that? She was only vaguely aware of Robards’s voice, talking on.
“I’m sorry to have been so blunt,” apologized the man, misconstruing her emotion. “It’s important you know how difficult it might be.”
Janet opened her eyes, forcing the smile. “Thank you for setting it out as you have.”
“I’m sure it’s not going to be like that!” tried Knox, from near the window. “I’m sure it’s all going to work out great!”
“It won’t fail from lack of preparation,” came in the commando officer, joining in the encouragement. “We’re as ready as we’re ever likely to be.”
“Which brings us back to you, Ms. Stone,” said Willsher.
Janet stirred, gratefully. She had to get out, she thought. The constricted feeling had gone beyond a mental impression. She felt the room closing in upon her, walls and ceiling pressing around her, squeezing her breathless. She said: “It’s the same location. John hasn’t been moved.”
“Son of a bitch!” said the soldier, driving a fist into the palm of his other hand in satisfied excitement. “Just what I wanted to hear.”
“We can go then,” said Willsher. It was not really a question, but the soldier responded.
“Two ackemma tomorrow,” he said.
She had it, Janet accepted. She had the precise information required by one man she loved to free the other man she loved. Jesus! she thought, despairingly.
Knox offered to accompany her back to the hotel but Janet said she wanted to be alone and the CIA officer withdrew at once, imagining her need for solitude to be caused by
the nearness of the operation, with no way of knowing the proper reason. Or the seed of an idea germinating in her mind.
She had the limousine drop her by the old city, and wended her way completely across the Greek-held section to emerge by the Famagusta Gate. Baxeter was waiting as he’d promised he would be, parked in Themis Street. The Volkswagen was dirty, as it had been the first time she’d ridden in it: why did such inconsequential things register?
He drove off as soon as she got in. “You were much longer than I expected,” he said.
Janet didn’t bother with an explanation. The determination that had started to grow on her way from the embassy was hardening within her. She said: “Are you to be part of the commando assault?”
Baxeter glanced quickly across at her and then back at the road. “Yes,” he said. “I’m trained.”
“I want to come,” announced Janet.
“What!” Baxeter had taken Kennedy Avenue, driving without any particular intention towards Famagusta. He jerked the car hurriedly into the side of the road, cranking on the handbrake.
“I want to come,” repeated Janet.
“That’s absurd! Utterly absurd! Laughable!”
“Not to me,” she said. “Nothing seems laughable to me: absurd a lot of the time but never laughable.”
“Why!”
“I’ve just had a long lecture about John’s needs,” said Janet. “It was very convincing. I think it’s about time I started doing the right thing and considered John’s needs, don’t you? John’s needs rather than my needs or your needs.”
“I promise you he will be gotten out,” said Baxeter.
“I know the time,” said Janet. “The precise hour and the precise day. Unless you agree to my coming I don’t intend to tell you.”
“Darling, this is ridiculous. How can you expect us to take you? You’re an …”
“… Amateur,” finished Janet, for him. “I won’t get in the way. I’ll do exactly what I am told, when I am told. I must be there, when John is freed. He’s got to see my face.”
“No.”
“I mean what I say.”
“It’s not my decision.”
“Then I’ll rely on the Americans,” said Janet. She stopped, breathing in courage for the final, determined ultimatum. “And I’ll tell them what you intended to do: how you intended to use their assault as a diversion. I know what that will mean: for me personally. What they’ll learn. I don’t care, if it’ll help what they’re trying to do. They might need to alter their planning. It’s got to work: that’s all that matters. That John is freed.”
30
It was a fishing boat again: in the darkness it seemed to have the same mid-section construction and be about the same size. Janet waited, expectantly, for the revulsion, but nothing came. This boat was cleaner, although there was still the stink of fish. The muttered challenge came as soon as Baxeter hauled her inboard from the rowboat which had ferried them from the bay near Cape Pyla. Janet guessed the mutter to be Hebrew, a language she did not understand. Baxeter’s retort was brief but sharp, in the tone of a superior to subordinates, and the challenge stopped abruptly.
“There’s shelter in the wheelhouse,” suggested Baxeter.
“No!” Janet said at once, remembering the last time. Baxeter had retreated from her, in attitude and mind: he had agreed that she should come as soon as she threatened going to the Americans, but he clearly begrudged the concession.
“It won’t be long: a mile or two,” he said.
“What then?”
“Transfer to a proper patrol boat.”
Until now Janet had not considered how they were going to reach the Lebanese mainland: it was going to be a great deal different than before. Trying to rebuild bridges between them, she said: “Now that I’ve explained what Robards told me, don’t you understand?”
“No,” rejected Baxeter. He was actually standing away from her, his gaze towards the open sea where he expected the Israeli patrol boats to be laying off.
Was it his reluctance to accept her presence? wondered Janet. Or was this a side of Baxeter she had not experienced before, the man’s ability to compartment himself, concentrating upon something or someone absolutely essential at that particular and absolute moment and able to relegate everything or everyone else of subsidiary importance? “It’s necessary that I come,” she insisted.
“You made that clear.”
There was a call, a single word in Hebrew, from the wheelhouse and Baxeter slightly changed the direction in which he was looking. Janet followed his gaze, hearing the patrol boat before she actually detected it: a throaty, heavy, bubbled sound of very powerful engines throttled back to minimal tick-over, practically a protest at the waste of such power.
The seamanship was superb. Without any obvious signals the captain of the fishing boat brought his vessel softly against the side of the matchingly maneuvered patrol boat and the two sides kissed the hanging fenders with the merest jolt.
“Step across: follow me,” ordered Baxeter.
Janet did as she was told without any stumble or uncertainty and was glad, anxious not to indicate this early that she might become an encumbrance. Despite the darkness she was immediately noticed. There was an eruption of babbled Hebrew against which Baxeter argued, and then started to shout: unseen, black-garbed figures whose faces and heads also seemed blackened shouted back, milling in front of them and gesticulating wildly. Some of the shouts were to the fishing boat that was easing away, and it at once reversed its engines. Janet guessed the instruction had been to return to take her off. The argument became a violent, yelling row, with Baxeter standing in front of her in the manner of a protector. Gradually Janet recognized a sameness in the gestures, and as she did Baxeter said to her over his shoulder: “They are insisting I talk to Tel Aviv.”
He reached protectively behind him and seized her arm to guide her towards the darker superstructure.
Once she entered the radio shack Janet understood where she was—on a very special custom-built vessel created for a very special function. Everyone wore black, one-piece boiler suits—even the zips were black—without any insignia of rank, fitted with push-back hoods that could be pulled up entirely to cover the head. There was no white light, just red, but despite the dullness Janet could make out that all the internal fittings were black, not a single item risking the reflection of any sort of light and that beyond, on the open deck, all the metal was blackened too, covered by some plastic or bitumen coating.
A fair-haired man insisted upon using the radio first, yelling into the mouthpiece as loudly as he had upon the deck, and then Baxeter snatched it away from him but spoke in more controlled tones than the other man, forceful reason against inconsiderate anger. From the transmitter came a flurry of questions and although she could not understand the language Janet was able to discern three different voices and guessed the concern would be as great in Israel as it appeared aboard this bizarre boat. First Baxeter responded, then the fair-haired man, then Baxeter again: the transmission ended with the fair-haired commando throwing down a pencil in disgust and stumping past her. Janet was near the doorway and he actually attempted to collide with her but at the last minute she went further sideways into the shack and he missed. Janet, who was pleased, hoped Baxeter had seen.
“You won?” guessed Janet.
“You can come,” agreed Baxeter. “I have to face an internal inquiry when it’s all over.”
“I’ m sorry.”
“I hope I’m not.”
The engines’ heavy bubble became within moments the roar of throttles being opened as the patrol boat unexpectedly lifted on its stern and hurtled forwards, smashing through the water. There was no warning of the acceleration and both she and Baxeter stumbled backwards: he managed to grab a support rail and then snatched out for her, stopping her falling.
“An expression of displeasure,” said Baxeter. “You’re very much resented.”
“I’m an expert at resentment
,” said Janet. She had to shout to make herself heard over the engine scream.
Baxeter did not try to talk. He pulled her from the radio room out on to the deck and then through a small housing covering some steps. He went down ahead of her, calling out in advance what she guessed to be some sort of warning of their approach. There were about eight men below, in the mess area: it smelled of stale cigarette smoke and bodies too close together for too long. The men regarded them sullenly, without any greeting: the vehement radio protestor was not one of them.
Baxeter went through the mess to a bunk area further back, groped in a locker and handed her a pair of the black coveralls that were clearly the regulation dress. He said: “I think they’re the smallest.”
Janet stood looking uncertainly down at the suit. It felt like a rubberized material, tight at the wrists and ankles, and lined with a silk-like material: closer she saw that the hood was wired, with earpieces inside, so that the wearer could be linked up to a communications system.
“How do I wear it?” she asked Baxeter. “Over my own clothes?” She had on her much-worn jeans, shirt, and sneakers.
“You can try but you’ll be damned hot,” said the Israeli. “If you take them off don’t expect the courtesy of their turning their backs; it’ll be part of making you feel unwelcome.”
Janet stripped to her pants and bra, not brazenly but not embarrassed either, her back defiantly to them: the overalls were big but wearable. Baxeter changed too, facing her with seeming indifference to her taking off her clothes. Baxeter indicated a seat at the far end of the table around which the other men sat and said: “It’ll be better if you get off your feet: you can very easily become exhausted constantly bracing yourself against the pitch and roll of this thing.”
She said: “How long?”
“Not more than an hour,” assured Baxeter. “This is the fastest incursion boat we’ve got.”
“What about the American fleet?” asked Janet. “Won’t they be between us?”
Betrayals Page 31