by Jack Higgins
“Any more information on Wrath of Allah?”
“I’m still trawling. We can always try Sharif, of course.”
“And who would he be?” Dillon asked.
“A major in the Republican Guard during Saddam’s day. Intelligence. He’s worked for me for a while now. Very expensive, but worth it. I’ll give you his photo and details.”
“Why not the Americans?”
“He’s not keen on them. Lost his wife and daughter in the bombing during the war. He’ll be of considerable value to you when you get there.”
“So I’m going?”
“It’s essential, dear boy, that you find Selim and haul him back,” said Ferguson. “We know a great deal about him, but there’s a lot more we need to know, particularly about his dealings with Ashimov and Belov.”
“So you don’t want me to kill him?”
“You’re always so basic. No, not if it can be helped. Our Russian friends will have a different point of view, but never mind that. The Superintendent is arranging your papers now. You’ll be pleased to know you’re a correspondent for the Belfast Telegraph. You do analysis, think pieces, not instant news. Your Northern Irish accent will suit the role admirably. The Superintendent has alerted Lacey and Parry. We’ll use the Citation XL. As it’s RAF, it can land at Baghdad even though commercial planes are grounded.”
At that moment the door buzzer sounded, and Roper pressed the release. Hannah Bernstein came in.
“Everything pushing ahead?” Ferguson asked.
“I think so, sir. They’re working on Dillon’s papers now, the plane will be ready for morning departure and I’ve spoken to Sharif. He’s arranging for you to stay at the Al Bustan, which should be perfectly satisfactory.”
“I don’t think so,” Billy said.
Ferguson frowned. “And why not?”
“Because you shouldn’t be the one going. If Dillon is to pass without suspicion as a newspaper reporter, he needs a photographer with him. I mean, what he really needs is someone to watch his back, but it would be convenient, in this case, if that someone could also pass himself off as a photographer.”
“And you could?”
“After Kate Rashid and company shot the hell out of me in Hazar, I had to forget my favorite hobby, diving, and so I took up photography. Did a course at the London College of Printing.”
“And you think you know your stuff?”
“First of all, I’d need two cameras, if not three. I’m sure you saw the photographers during the war, draped in the damn things. As for lenses, a wide-angle zoom and a long zoom. Nikon, I think, though I wouldn’t bother with digital because that would mean I’d need a laptop. Now, as far-”
“Spare me, for God’s sake.” Ferguson turned to Hannah. “Process his papers, Superintendent.” He nodded to Dillon. “Is that all right with you?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good. Since you’re going in with the RAF, there won’t be any problem over weapons.” He said to Roper, “Have you got the Belov report ready?”
“Right here.” Roper pushed five copies over.
“Excellent.” Ferguson picked one up and gave it to Dillon. “Gives you something to read on the plane.”
“I look forward to it.”
“You take one, too, Superintendent, and you, young Salter, you’d better get home and break the good news to Harry. Now, we all have a great deal to do. I suggest we get a move on.”
RAF Northolt on the edge of London catered not only to the royal family and the Prime Minister and other politicians, but was a great favorite with executive jets. So it was there the following morning that Ashimov delivered Greta Novikova to a waiting Falcon.
The two pilots were British, named Kelso and Brown, but the stewardess was Russian and introduced herself as Tania.
Ashimov kissed Greta on both cheeks. “Safe journey. I’ll have someone introduce himself at the hotel. You can take it from there.”
“Just one question, Yuri. Do I kill him?”
“Whatever you think best, my dear. Though it does rather seem like he’s served his purpose, doesn’t it?” He smiled. “Now, off you go.”
Later, watching the Falcon rise, he smiled slightly to himself. What a woman. What a marvelous bloody woman. And then he turned and walked to his waiting limousine.
At Farley Field, the small RAF installation used by Ferguson ’s people for covert operations, Dillon, Hannah and Ferguson arrived in the Daimler and were met by Squadron Leader Lacey and Flight Lieutenant Parry standing beside a Citation XL. Both men wore flying overalls with rank tabs, and the plane had RAF roundels.
“Good to see you, Sean,” Lacey said. “Will it be messy?”
“Well, you know me. It usually is.”
He gave Parry his traveling bag to take on board and Lacey said, “The Quartermaster’s left a bag for you inside. He said you’d find everything you need.”
“Excellent,” Ferguson said. “I do admire efficiency.”
At that moment, an Aston Martin came around the corner of the terminal building, and Harry and Billy got out and approached, Harry carrying his nephew’s bag.
“You’ve done it again, you little Irish sod,” said Harry to Dillon. “I mean, we’ve had bad times before, but going to Baghdad! That’s a bit rich, even for you.”
He gave the bags to Parry, and Dillon said, “I’m under orders, Harry, from your man here, and Billy’s a volunteer.”
“Well, more fool him.”
Hannah took two envelopes from her briefcase and gave them one each. “New passports, still in your real identities. They document that you’ve been to every war zone possible in the past few years. Your press credentials are all in order. Hopefully, Sharif will have important information for you when you arrive.”
At that moment, Ferguson ’s mobile went and he answered it. “Yes?” He frowned. “I see. Thanks.” He put it away. “Roper. A Falcon owned by Belov International took off from Northolt an hour ago with Greta Novikova on board, destination Baghdad.”
“Surprise, surprise,” Dillon said.
Harry embraced Billy and turned to Dillon. “Bring him back in one piece or else.”
As Billy went up the steps, Hannah hesitated, then kissed Dillon on the cheek. “My God, I finally made it.” He smiled. “Keep the faith.”
She walked away, and Ferguson said, “Do be careful, Dillon. It would seriously inconvenience me if you didn’t make it back, you and Billy both. As for Selim, if the Russians get to him, I think he’s a dead man. I’m sure that’s what Novikova is all about. Do what seems appropriate. Do I make myself clear?”
“You always do.”
Dillon went up the steps and joined Billy. They settled down and Parry pulled up the door, then joined Lacey in the cockpit, where the squadron leader already had the engines rumbling into life.
“Here we go,” Billy said. “Into the bleeding war zone again.”
“Come off it, Billy, you love it.”
Dillon opened his bag and produced Roper’s notes. He started to read while Billy worked his way through the Daily Mail. It didn’t take long, perhaps twenty minutes, before Dillon was finished.
“Any good?” Billy asked.
“Roper does a good job. He should write thrillers.” He tossed it across. “Read it and learn what we’re up against. The full and active life of Josef Belov.”
IN THE BEGINNING JOSEF BELOV
6
Once, during the early days of the Chechen War, perhaps 1991, although he could never remember exactly, Josef Belov, a colonel in the KGB and more used to intelligence work, killed five Russian soldiers personally. It happened in this way:
Belov was head of the KGB’s Department 3, concerned with intelligence gathering about the Western world, but Chechnya was something else again, a case of all hands to the pumps, which was why he found himself being driven through the charnel house that was once the Chechen capital.
He sat in the front seat of an American jeep, of all
things, being protected by Special Forces paratroopers, who had procured a large number of the American vehicles because of their proven worth in combat.
Belov had a corporal driving, and a sergeant standing in the back behind a heavy machine gun mounted on a swivel. He himself had an unusual weapon to hand, an Israeli Uzi machine pistol with one magazine taped to another to allow instant reloading.
There were refugees everywhere, lots of women and children, some pushing prams loaded with a few pitiful possessions, all screaming in terror at the sounds of battle: artillery shells landing with a crash, buildings collapsing in clouds of dust, helicopters passing overhead firing rockets into Chechen defensive positions.
None of this bothered Belov, the old Afghan hand. What did was the sight of a number of soldiers crowded around an army truck at the side of the road, who were obviously waiting their turn as a young girl lying back on the driver’s seat was in the process of being raped.
Belov waved a hand, and the jeep stopped. He saw an older woman nearby, her face stained with blood. She struggled free of the man who held her, saw Belov and lurched toward him.
“Sir, I beg you. My daughter is only thirteen.”
Two soldiers grabbed her again and pulled her back. Belov said, “Let her go.”
They looked crazed, faces filthy and sweat stained. One of them cried, “Who in the hell do you think you are?” and took a pistol from his holster. Belov produced his Uzi, shot him through the head, swung as the other one pulled the woman in front of him and sprayed a short burst, which unfortunately killed the woman as well as the soldier. The others turned in alarm and Belov fired again and again.
Some of the soldiers started to fire back, and the sergeant returned their fire with the heavy machine gun, scattering men across the sidewalk. The girl was still there, Belov saw her clearly, and then the fuel tank on the truck exploded and the whole thing fireballed. Belov’s driver immediately reversed away.
The sergeant said, “You were right to do that, Colonel. I’ve got two daughters back there in Moscow.”
“But I haven’t. I did it because it was right in the eyes of God. A great man named Oliver Cromwell said that once. A general who turned England into the first republic in Europe.” He took out his cigarette tin and extracted one, passing the tin to the others. “Let’s get moving. They usually say things get better. In this case… I rather doubt that.”
Born in the Ukraine in 1943, Josef Belov had never known his father, a peasant farmer who, like several million other Soviets, had gone away to fight the war against the Nazi invader. He never came back.
His strong extended family was held together by his mother, and they farmed the family properties until a number of fellow countrymen who had elected to join the Germans turned up, and put the torch to their crops and the buildings, killed the old men and had their way with the women.
Belov’s mother survived and made her way to Moscow, where she had relatives. What saved Belov in the years after he finished state schooling was conscription. Whatever else one could say about communism in the Soviet days, it did not waste people and their potential. It was the Red Army that discovered that Belov had a brain, nurtured him, tested him in various ways and sent him to officer cadet school, then a special department at Moscow University, where he particularly found his niche in social psychology, the science of people interacting in groups. Combined with moral philosophy, it made for an interesting mixture that, together with a flair for languages, inevitably led him into the KGB.
After 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he found himself heavily involved in that theater of war, and for many years he encountered an enemy, spurred on by the Taliban, who were experts in skinning alive the young conscripts who fell into their hands. Emasculation was simply a side product. At least it gave him the chance to add Arabic to his languages, but the brutality, the cruelty, the sheer barbarism, had an effect on his very soul that would not go away.
There was no time for marriage, the decencies. He was always busy – working on behalf of Department 3 in Northern Ireland, for example, feeding the Irish conflict with arms for the IRA. There were useful contacts there, especially in the Drumore area of County Louth, where the local IRA commander, a particularly hard article named Dermot Kelly, became more than useful to him over the years.
And then, in 1988, at the age of forty-five, and a major, he met Ruth.
She was twenty years younger than he and the very opposite in nature: deeply religious, as befit her biblical name, a schoolteacher and social worker concerned only with the good of others. Belov, the hard man, the soldier who had killed when necessary, adored her for her sweetness, her simplicity, her kindness.
When she had found she was pregnant, he had been over the moon, and then it had happened. She had attended a school meeting for parents one night. He’d arranged to pick her up, but then something serious had come up, KGB business, and that came first.
She’d started for home on foot in the driving rain and sleet, and somewhere on the way had been abducted, her half-naked body found in an alley close to Red Square the following morning. Standing in the mortuary looking down at her bruised and beaten face, Belov knew a horror and an anger that would never go away. It froze the soul in him, took away all humanity.
He used no police, no militia. He pulled in all the terrible power of the KGB, found the two men responsible and had them brought before him, looked on their drunken, drug-ravaged faces and knew what he must do.
They could have been charged with several offences including her murder, could have been sent to the Lubianka, but that would have meant trials, paperwork, courts. Instead, he sent for a young lieutenant who had been allocated to him after severe wounds in Afghanistan.
Yuri Ashimov had been born in Siberia. Like Belov, conscription had been the making of him and he’d followed a similar route, which had, in the same way, taken him to Afghanistan, a terrible war, but one in which a man like Ashimov could make his mark. He couldn’t believe his luck when he was allocated to Belov at Department 3, for Belov’s exploits in Kabul had made him a legend.
Standing before Belov’s desk, he could feel the pain, felt it as personally as if this man were a brother.
“Major, what would you like me to do?”
“I will sign an order, releasing these two animals from the Lubianka. There will be no guards, just handcuffs. Then I will wait for them at an appropriate place by the river. I will kill them personally, Yuri. What happens afterward doesn’t matter to me. If I have to meet the consequences, I will.”
“Well, it bothers me, Major. With due respect, I’ve no intention of seeing anything bad happen to one of our greatest heroes. Leave it to me, I’ll get them released and your name won’t be on it.”
“How will you do that?”
“I have contacts, Major. And then, you said by the river? I’ll bring them to the Gorsky Bridge, take the cuffs off and you can finish them.”
“You would do that for me?”
“Of course, Major. It would be an honor.”
And so it became a relationship that grew and flourished over the years, and when the government forces collapsed in Afghanistan in 1992, Belov, by then a colonel, and Ashimov, a captain, were among the last to leave, accompanied by another KGB colonel named Putin.
It all seemed to blur around that time, the Chechen Republic declaring independence, the carnage of the civil war, Gorbachev, the USSR ceasing to exist, the wall down in Berlin and then the mad boom years of the Russian Federation and Yeltsin, years that for the strangest of reasons were the making of Josef Belov into one of the greatest oil barons in the world and the creator of Belov International.
As the man responsible for subversive activities in the Western world, for the creation of chaos and uncertainty and fear, the events of 1991 and the first Gulf War had provided Belov with a whole new field of enterprise.
Belov had been active in Northern Ireland for some years, supplying the Provisional IRA with
weaponry, linking various dissident elements with Muslim terrorist groups in the Middle East, and so on. An interesting thing about the IRA was that as the momentum of its own struggle had died down, it had left seething discontent among many of its members who, as had been the habit of the Irish over the centuries, then sought service as mercenaries overseas where their skills could be put to good use, money on the counter – and where better than the Middle East, particularly Iraq after the war. So Belov’s contacts on both sides grew and flourished.
Then, after the roller-coaster years of Boris Yeltsin, everything changed. Privatization of a great deal of the Russian economy became the order of the day, and Belov didn’t like it. He preferred order, discipline, a strong hand. Perhaps all the books he’d read about Oliver Cromwell had affected him more than he’d realized. So he pulled strings and moved to Baghdad, taking Ashimov with him.
It was a turbulent time, Saddam gassing the Kurds and putting down the Shiite rebellion with an iron hand. The country, of course, was suffering economically and not only from the oil embargo, and Belov could see the results. In fact, it got him interested in oil in a way he had never been before.
Sitting on the terrace at the Russian Embassy by the River Tigris having a vodka one evening, he said to Ashimov, now a major, “Yuri, have you any concept of the wealth of the oil business in western Siberia? Of the natural gas and coal and some of the richest mineral deposits in the world? Yet little of it is being developed right. Too much government interference. It’s a waste, just like what’s happening here in Iraq.”
“I don’t know about Siberia, but there’s little you can do about it here, I’m afraid. If Saddam lives up to form, he’s going to end up goading the Yanks and the Brits into another invasion.”
“You really think he could be that insane?”
“Absolutely.”
Ashimov stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a date. Dinner and possibly dancing at Al Bustan.”