Desert Fire

by David Hagberg

  “I understand.”

  Whalpol poured a cup of coffee and lit a cigarette, then went back to the binoculars. He had eight people on this project. Three were asleep in the next room, two were here watching the monitoring equipment and the other three were in an unmarked car just around the corner from the estate driveway at the bottom of the hill. They were armed only with handguns. In a firefight with the Iraqis they wouldn’t last sixty seconds.

  It was curious to be thinking in such terms, but in fact he and Roemer had discovered that General Sherif was insane. If indeed the man was the terrorist Michael, the situation was doubly dangerous. Carlos had been an amateur compared to Michael, who’d been implicated in everything from the massacre of the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics to the murders of the entire cabinet of South Yemen’s President ‘Ali Nasir Muhammad in 1986, and more than a dozen spectacularly successful airliner hijackings.

  With such a man commanding a dozen heavily armed troops, this would turn to bloodshed unless the Iraqi Ambassador could talk Sherif down.

  One thing Whalpol was certain of was that General Sherif would never stand trial in Germany.

  55

  THEY WERE LATE. It was dark when the small commuter airplane touched down at Bern’s tiny airport and taxied to the terminal. The handful of passengers who had flown with Roemer were grumbling.

  On the short, bumpy flight from Bonn and then over from Zurich, Roemer had kept coming back to the way Leila Kahled would take the news that her father was a murderer. He could understand what she would have to endure; he had lived with just such a burden all his life.

  Roemer brought his nylon overnight bag to the customs table. He handed the officer his BKA identification.

  “Is your visit to Switzerland official, sir?”

  “No.”

  The officer returned the ID. “You may pass.”

  He took the airport bus into town to the Europcar/ National office, where he rented a small Fiat. He was on the road to Interlaken ten minutes later, pushing the car to its limit, hoping he wasn’t already too late.

  He unzipped the bag on the seat next to him, fumbled inside until he found his gun, pulled it out and stuffed it into his belt.

  He wished his father were dead. It would have been so much easier had he died on the move from the sanatorium. He could have been buried in the small Interlaken graveyard, and that entire hidden portion of Roemer’s life could have been over.

  “Die,” he mumbled. “Get it done with, for God’s sake.”

  56

  JACOB WADUD RACED through the night as fast as he dared drive from the Second Armored Division Headquarters at Al-Falluja to Baghdad, a highway distance of forty miles.

  He was a big, meaty man with a barrel chest and thick, weathered features. He had been raised on the wrong side of Kirkuk in the north, where he fought his way through school and onto the police force. Twelve years ago, after his young wife’s death from cancer, he had moved to Baghdad, where he had done a two-year stint in the army and then had become a federal homicide detective.

  He had been in riots and wars, and yet tonight he was frightened. General Sherif was a national hero. They called him the Lion of Baghdad. His photograph still hung in the orderly room of the Second Armored, which he had commanded during the wars with Iran and Kuwait until his elevation to this government post. He was the soldiers’ general, still, in a nation of soldiers. Hardly an Arab in Baghdad (including Wadud himself, who had served under Sherif) didn’t know and love him. But he was a murderer, and almost certainly he planned some private war against the West.

  Wadud entered the city from the southwest forty-three minutes after leaving Al-Falluja. Downtown, he parked his battered old Chevrolet around the corner from the Central Telegraph Office.

  He hurried the final block on foot, turning down a narrow alley that opened into a well-tended courtyard bordered by tiny shops and a narrow brick building marked MINISTRY OF FINANCE—ANNEXE. The Annexe was a front for the Mukhabarat operational headquarters. Iraqi Federal Police often worked hand in hand with the Secret Service.

  He rang the bell; the door buzzed and he went in. He showed his identification and turned in his handgun to the civilian guard in the small anteroom.

  “Go right up, Inspector. Is-say-yid Kahair is expecting you.”

  Wadud took the elevator up to the third floor, where Bashir Kahair was waiting. They had agreed this afternoon, after Roemer’s stunning telephone call, that Wadud should go to the general’s old command to find out about the twelve troops he had taken with him to Germany. All of them had been drawn from the Second Armored, which was still fiercely loyal to the general.

  “Well?” Kahair asked without preamble.

  “You’re not going to like it,” Wadud said.

  They went down the corridor into Kahair’s office, closing the door behind them. They didn’t bother sitting.

  “Give it to me straight, Jacob,” Kahair said sharply.

  “All twelve he has with him are trigger-happy crazies.”

  Kahair’s eyebrows rose.

  “High combat time for every last one of them in Iran and Kuwait. Hand-to-hand, infiltration, weapons, strategy. The worst part is that every damned one of them is a demolitions expert.”

  “What can he be thinking?”

  “I paid a call to an old friend working munitions,” Wadud said. “He wouldn’t tell me in so many words, but he seems to believe that the general took along enough explosives—plastique, he thinks—to blow half of Germany off the map.”

  Kahair was staggered by the news. “The German Chancellor called our ambassador for a meeting late this afternoon. Told him that the general probably murdered the two women, and that the German government requested a release of his diplomatic status. They want to arrest him.”

  Wadud shook his head. “We’ll bring him back here.”

  “That’s the least of my worries, Jacob.”

  Wadud knew what the Mukhabarat deputy meant. If the Germans tried to arrest General Sherif, he would resist them with force. The fanatics he had with him would love a firefight. According to the sergeant in munitions, they called themselves the Basra Brigade.

  “I’ll arrange transportation for you,” Kahair said. “Can you be ready to leave within the hour?”

  “Yes, sir,” Wadud said. “I’ll bring the general home.”

  57

  THE CHALET AT Jungfraujochstrasse, No. 15, was a modest structure built into the side of a hill. The dark, hulking mountains rose all around it.

  Leila passed the entrance and parked her Mercedes a half mile farther up the road. She headed back on foot, stopping at the side of the road fifty yards from the driveway. She could see a few lights from the chalet through the trees ahead, and she could smell wood smoke from the chimney.

  A chill wind rustled in the trees. It was cold and lonely here.

  She’d seen no other car parked along the road. Dr. Azziza was not here yet. Perhaps he would wait until after midnight, when the household would be bedded down.

  If the property clerk had telephoned Sergeant Rilke, they’d be waiting for her to sneak up on them. They would have an alarm system. Dogs. Possibly even armed security guards.

  She wondered, though. All these years the old man had lived here, or at the sanatorium, without making any fuss that would call attention to him. Elaborate security precautions would in themselves create a stir.

  At the very least, however, Sergeant Rilke would be armed and ready to open fire on someone sneaking up to the house.

  But if a woman were to walk openly up the driveway, knock on the front door and ask for help, it might throw them off long enough for her to get inside.

  Was she doing this because of a sense of justice? Because she hated Khodr Azziza and his kind? Or because … she had fallen in love with Walther Roemer?

  Leila transferred her automatic from her purse to her coat pocket and continued down the road, turning in at the driveway and trudging up the ste
ep slope to the house.

  The lights she had seen from the road were all outside. Not one window was lit from within. The doors and windows were all in shadow.

  Leila stepped onto a broad parking area between the garage and the front door. She was exposed here under the bright lights; one shot would be plenty. She would not have a chance.

  A voice came out of the darkness somewhere ahead. “That’s far enough, Fräulein.”

  Leila stopped. “I cannot see you, Herr … ?”

  “Turn around and leave, and I may not shoot you.”

  “I have come to help.”

  “With your killer, Khodr Azziza?”

  Leila was stunned. How had the man known? It wasn’t possible.

  “Macht schnell! Go away. Leave before I kill you.”

  “You must believe me, Sergeant Rilke. I have come here to help. Dr. Azziza will be here soon, and then you will have no chance.”

  Rilke laughed. “You have a sense of humor. Leave before I lose mine.”

  A bullet ricocheted off the driveway inches from her left foot, spraying her legs with stone chips. The muzzle flash had come from the left of the door. Probably an open window.

  Rilke fired a second shot, this one whining off the stones to Leila’s right.

  Then three shots were fired in rapid succession from behind and above Leila.

  “Don’t move, Leila,” Dr. Azziza called. “I don’t want to kill you.”

  Azziza had been waiting in the darkness. He had pinpointed the muzzle flash from Rilke’s gun and had targeted it. Azziza had known she would be coming here. She was his bait.

  Behind her a branch snapped. Azziza had been waiting in a tree.

  She turned slowly as she put her right hand in her coat pocket, her fingers around the grip of her Beretta .380.

  58

  THE NIGHT HAD turned transparent. Here in the mountains the air was thin, hard to breathe. Leila’s heart hammered.

  Azziza, dressed in black, a high-powered rifle with a night scope held loosely in one hand, came out of the darkness.

  “You took a big chance coming back,” he said. “Rilke could have shot you.”

  “I’m not going to let you murder the old man.”

  Azziza stood ten feet away, near enough for Leila to see his strong face. “Your love is misplaced, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Don’t be a fool. I returned to make sure that Lotti Roemer is brought back to Baghdad to be used as a hostage.”

  “He wouldn’t survive the trip.”

  “If he died in transit, at least we would not have killed him.”

  Rilke was surely dead. Azziza would not have exposed himself unless he was sure. But there was still the house staff. Perhaps they had telephoned the Swiss police when the shooting began. Perhaps if she could only delay him long enough …

  “I cut the telephone lines to the house,” Azziza said, “and Rilke sent the German staff away more than an hour ago, so don’t be concerned about innocent people getting hurt.” He moved forward, and Leila’s grip tightened on the automatic. “Long before you could get that little gun out of your pocket, I would shoot you. Don’t make me do that.”

  Leila was paralyzed. She had killed before, but she was not a seasoned, cold-blooded expert like Azziza. She operated with courage, brains and sometimes her good looks. This was new.

  “Take the gun out and very slowly lay it on the ground, and then step away,” Azziza said.

  She eased her grip on the Beretta and slowly withdrew her hand from her pocket, holding it well away from her side so that Azziza could see she was unarmed.

  “The gun, Leila.”

  “No.” She turned and walked up to the house. Behind her she heard the snick of the rifle bolt, and she expected the shot to come. But it did not.

  A window to the left of the front door was open. Leila stepped up and looked inside. Sergeant Rilke’s body was jammed up against a large chair. Most of his forehead was gone, and a large dark stain had spread from a hole in his chest.

  She stepped back—into Azziza’s arms.

  “Not a pretty sight, is it?”

  Leila spun around and raked his face with her fingernails, trying for his eyes. He reared back, hissing.

  “Bitch!” Blood streamed down his cheek.

  Leila came at him again, but this time he was expecting it. His fist caught her high in the stomach just below her breasts. Her lungs emptied, nausea rose and she fell back on the step, her head banging against the door frame.

  She fumbled in her coat pocket for her gun, but she couldn’t make her fingers work. She bent over and vomited.

  Azziza stepped around her, opened the door and went inside. She began to shake violently, tears filling her eyes. Al Kumait had never seemed so far away.

  She had lost. Azziza had won. After tonight there would be nothing left for her. Trying to save a dying mass murderer, she had destroyed herself as surely as if she had put her gun to her own head.

  As a true Palestinian, born in Jerusalem, she had nowhere to go. Her father would never understand; he had lost too much in the war and now was incapable of change. All the lost souls of relatives who had died in the PLO camps talked to him in the night.

  Headlights flashed in the trees, and a small car screamed up the driveway, sliding sideways to a halt, spewing gravel.

  Leila propped herself up as Walther Roemer leaped out, gun in hand, and raced toward her. “No,” she tried to cry out.

  “You!”

  Leila raised her right hand, as if to fend off a blow. Roemer dove to the ground, snapping off two shots toward a spot behind her.

  Azziza’s high-powered rifle cracked from inside the house, the bullet chinking a tree. Roemer fired again.

  “I didn’t kill your father,” Azziza shouted from inside.

  Roemer was fifteen feet from Leila, his gun trained on the open doorway behind her.

  “I tried to stop him,” Leila called too weakly for him to hear.

  “I have no quarrel with you, Investigator. But I swear to you that your father was already dead. There was a pillow over his face. I think Rilke killed him rather than let him be taken.”

  Roemer’s eyes were wild. Leila wanted to tell him to back down and Azziza would leave. Otherwise, Azziza would almost certainly kill him.

  “Come out of there, Azziza. Or I’ll shoot your partner.”

  The assassin laughed, his voice closer now. He was just within the doorway. “She came here to stop me. She’s in love with you. Didn’t you know it?”

  Even from a distance Leila could see that Roemer was suddenly confused, uncertain—exactly what Azziza wanted.

  She heard a soft scuffling inside; Azziza was going around to the open window for a clear shot at Roemer. She reached into her coat pocket, pulled out her gun, thumbed the safety off and lurched to her feet. Roemer shouted something, then fired a shot, the bullet smacking into the door frame.

  She reached to the edge of the window, bringing the Beretta up as Azziza appeared. She pulled the trigger. The automatic bucked in her hand and surprise spread across Azziza’s dark features. She fired a second time, the shot hitting the killer in the chest near the first shot, and he crashed backward on top of Rilke’s body, the rifle clattering to the floor.

  For several long seconds there was no sound. Azziza was looking at her, his lips parted in a grimace, or perhaps, a smile, his eyes wide. Then his head drooped forward on his chest.

  Leila turned slowly. Roemer was on his feet. His gun was pointing at her.

  She let her hand go slack at her side and the Beretta dropped to the ground.

  “Why?” Roemer asked.

  “I came to take your father to Baghdad. I’m not a murderer.”

  Roemer winced. “But you called him.”

  She shook her head. She still felt weak. “They had a bug on my telephone. They knew I was coming here.”

  Roemer stared at her. He wanted to say something. He sighed deeply, then came up the walk, passin
g her without a word, and went into the house. She followed him.

  In an upstairs bedroom, Lotti Roemer’s frail, wasted body lay on a bed. His lips and face were blue, his eyes open and bulging. Leila stood by the door. Roemer looked down at his father’s body.

  The room was filled with photographs and old certificates in gilded frames, mementos of Lotti Roemer’s career in the SS. Photographs of Hitler and Himmler and other Nazi leaders, of Dachau and its administrators, of some nightclub where, in his uniform, he sat at a booth with his arms around two women. Finally it was over. She could return to Baghdad. At least it was home. They could do whatever they wanted with her. Maybe the Jews would thank her. Who could know?

  Tears streamed down Roemer’s cheeks, but he looked as if a tremendous burden had been lifted from his shoulders.

  59

  THE LONG BLACK limousine glided up the Bonnerstrasse and turned into the driveway of the Klauber estate. It was dark. Whalpol watched he big car through the infrared spotter scope his technicians had brought up earlier in the day.

  The images in the lens were clear, but ethereal, washed of color.

  He was alone in the house with Robert Neuenfeld, his communications specialist. An hour ago, four of Sherif’s uniformed troops had gone with the three vanloads of IBM-marked crates. Thalberg and Adler, two BND fieldmen from Munich, had followed them out to the KwU facility while Whalpol’s other men took up their positions below the driveway so that they could watch the approach roads. Sherif’s staff had off-loaded the crates into the main research and development building. Whalpol had expected them to return here, but they had not; they had so far remained in the R&D building. A half hour ago the plant’s day shift had been released, and Whalpol’s men reported that the gigantic facility seemed nearly deserted.

  The limousine pulled up at the front door of the main house. The chauffeur jumped out and opened the rear door for a tall, gray-haired man in a dark overcoat. Whalpol immediately recognized him as the Iraqi Ambassador.

  “Get me Chancellor Kohl’s office,” Whalpol told his communications man without looking away from the scope.