It is a way of life in the Israeli community that title and position count for little when the question of security is at stake. He could browbeat a senior diplomat in a way unthought of throughout Europe.
if they can attack here they can attack in the United States. One of our men has died already that this one speech could be made. How many more do we lose protecting him if we go to America? And for w h a t . . . ? '
'He goes for precisely the reason that he came here in the first instance. The threat was known, but we do not bow to threats . . .'
'He was a scientist, not a target dummy.'
'. .. The decision was made at Cabinet level that he should come. We will not be cowed by these people.'
'Before, that was a reasonable risk. Not now. They did well tonight, those bastards. That they missed was our luck. No credit to us. Luck, and Mackowicz.'
'The decision must come from Jerusalem.' The Ambassador spoke with finality.
'The decision is easy, Excellency. Very simple, no doubt you can answer it for me. Which way is the Professor more important? A household name, famous, and dead; a martyr to the cause of the survival of our country. That is one option. Or more important in his office, in his anonymity, with his papers and his tables and his work. It is sad you cannot consult with Mackowicz, he would pick between the options.'
There was a purple, veined flush high on the Ambassador's cheeks. He turned to the door. 'As I have said, the decision must come from the Foreign Ministry. I will relay your comments, and they will have consideration.'
'And what of Sokarev? What of his ability to go on?
Will that have consideration?'
But the Ambassador and the security attache were gone.
Elkin looked at the two new men who were to share the room with him, then twisted away lest they should see the tears that now lapped at his eyelids. Like a brother to him, Mackowicz. An elder brother, protective, dominating. And now without his stomach, intestines splayed to the winds.
He crumpled himself full length on his bed. That Sokarev was alive and breathing heavily a few feet away was an inadequate consolation.
The Ambassador, an experienced diplomat, was well versed in the art of self-preservation. His request to Jerusalem for guidance contained no suggestion of his own, and added with prominence the concern of Sokarev's remaining bodyguard. The coded reply he awaited, a jumble of numbers, arrived in the embassy communications room within two hours. After it had been de-ciphered it was brought to him.
XXCLL4782.I9
FOREIGNMINISTRY JERUSALEM
OO1 82.08 PERSONAL FOREIGN MINISTER TO AMBAS-SADORUK ITEM HIS EYES ONLY ITEM AFTER URGENT
CONSIDERATIONS SOKAREV'S MOVEMENTS EYE
INFORMING SIMULTANEOUSLY AMBASSADORUSA TO
ANNOUNCE CANCELLATION OF ABOVE'S TRAVEL AND
SPEAKING ARRANGEMENTS IN NY AND OTHERS ITEM
SOKAREV SHOULD RETURN ISRAEL FIRST AVAILABLE
NON-STOP ELAL FLIGHT ITEM WE DEMAND FULLEST
SECURITY DURING REMAINING HOURS SOKAREV'S
PRESENCE UK PARTICULAR LONDON HEATHROW
DEPARTURE ITEM YOU WILL ISSUE STRONGEST PROTEST TO UK GOVERNMENT AT LEVEL NOT BELOW
FOREIGN MINISTER PREFERABLY PRIME MINISTER
AT LAX UK SECURITY STRESSING FULL INFORMATION AND WARNING PROVIDED BY OUR SECURITY
SERVICE PRIOR SOKAREV ARRIVAL ITEM WE REQUIRE
PUBLIC EXPRESSION REGRET ITEM COMMUNICATION
COMPLETE
XXDYY4782.I9
Alone in the flat in Beersheba the scientist's wife heard over the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation's final radio news bulletin of the attack on her husband. The information came without warning, as the news media transmitted the story faster than those Government authorities responsible for her husband's welfare could react.
In desperation she tried to telephone first her son; on operational stand-by and not available to take messages.
Next her daughters; both out of their student hostels and not expected back till later. The Director at Dimona, an old friend; away at a conference in Tiberias. The seemingly endless lingering of the disappointments as she waited four times for a familiar voice to come on the line, and on each occasion had her hopes dashed, took a heavy toll. She sat in David Sokarev's chair, beside the fire that would not be lit till the winter came and the cold over the desert and waited for the early morning light still five hours away.
That she knew her man was safe was of some small help.
What caused her to sob soundlessly into the half-darkness of the centre of the room was the knowledge of the deep fear and terror he would have suffered. So inoffensive, so mild, without enemies, without a voice that was ever raised in anger. Buried away in a cramped office, insulated against the hatred and hostility that lay rampant beyond the wire fences of Dimona. But would his work, and the implications of his study, provide him with an insight into this obscenity? She wondered. The preparation of the bomb itself, awful, grotesque, multi-destructive, would that have prepared him to confront the viciousness of the last hours? It was not his way to see the bomb as a finished and completed article of war. Just figures and notes on paper. Drawings that were meaningless to others. Long hours and days and months of work. Calculations and equations.
He would not have understood. He had been too long absent from the world of men who now fought round him to take and protect his life. He would be alone, defenceless.
That was why she wept for him.
The Special Air Service squad were brought to Chisholm Road in two Black Maria police vans from an improvised helicopter landing pad on the football pitches beside the main road that ran out of Richmond to the south. They wore full-length black dungarees, were not encumbered with webbing and equipment and none boasted badges of rank on their upper arms or shoulders. They jumped casually and with ease from the open doors at the back of the vans, and then the heavy canvas bags were handed down.
Jimmy stood in the shadows and watched them. Not youngsters, but most of them still half his age, hair cut close, clean shaven, disinterested faces visible only when the lights rotating on the roofs of the fire engines illuminated the path across which they walked. The killing squad. Different to Jimmy, not self-taught as he had been.
Trained and practised, funded by Government that their expertise should be developed. Selected with care and toughened and primed. Taught not to act independently, but in the pack, deadly and irreversible when the leash was slipped. If they felt excitement they did not show it, just trooped after the one who was their leader across the road to where the Home Office man waited. Some squatted low over sheets of paper held flat on the pavement, others stood in a circle peering into the area lit by torches.
William Dawson was a thorough man. He took them through the diagram of the outside of the house, all windows and doors marked in red, first the ground floor, then the upper storey. The squad said nothing, two taking notes, the others watching and silent. Then came the plans of the interior of the end-of-terrace home. Drawn to scale.
Red marking the doorways again, and blue crosses on those that the neighbours had reported to be fitted with locks and bolts. Fingers ran along the routes of the hallway, the stairs and the landing. Occasionally those at the back would crane their necks up the street to relate the floodlit frontage with the paperwork. Jimmy stood half a dozen paces back from the huddle; Jones was far behind him at the steps of the police control vehicle.
Dawson was talking, fast and coherent, sketching the plan he had described to the Prime Minister. Diversions, and time factors, and entry points, and opposition capability, and of the laser. There were precedents, and case histories and suggestions. The attention that the squad gave the Civil Servant was the accolade that he had done his work, was as expert in the planning as they would be in the execution.
When the group broke up it was to appointed tasks.
Four to unload the firepower they had brought with them, to lay the weapons out and to load them. Four m
ore to begin a scrounging expedition among the fire brigades, for ropes and axes and the fifteen-foot ladders that would carry them to the first-floor windows. The officer and his sergeant detached themselves, and in the company of a ranking police officer made their way past the front doors of the houses, traversing the front gardens, working closer to the house that they would storm. When they had seen the front they moved, silent and catlike, through another house and across its back garden till they came without warning on the police who watched the rear of Number 25. From the outside there was little to tell them of the situation beyond the brick walls. All curtains drawn, windows darkened.
'They had the light on a bit ago. In the front, upstairs, the small room where the girl sleeps. It was off within a minute. The men across the road from the front think the curtain there moved once, but it's bloody difficult to be sure. It was when we first started the noise business that the Home Office chap wanted. The second time we did it nothing happened, not that we saw. There's been three more times we've used the noise since then, and nothing.
No movement that we've seen.'
The Chief Inspector was depressed. That this was not police work he acknowledged, was grateful he was not asking among his men for volunteers for an attack party, but the very competence and hardness of the new arrivals had shaken and concerned him.
'What chance have you got of getting those people out alive?' That was the nub of the problem as he saw it, and he raised the question as they slipped back toward the concentration of vehicles and men.
'Can't say,' replied the officer quietly, as if their voices would carry. 'Depends where the family are, whether they're together. What state the wounded fellow is in.
How much speed we can muster. If we're fast enough there's a good chance. The theory is that it's difficult for a man to turn his gun on his hostages as we're coming through the door. He has no protection. He goes with them. There's not many relish that — that's what the handbook says, at any rate. But it's all theory. There's nothing cut and dried.'
Before they reached the fire engine closest to the house, and where men in uniform had gathered, and where there would be ears to listen to their conversation, the officer said, 'Don't misunderstand me, but isn't there some question about priorities? The hostages aren't at the top of the list as I see it. If they were we'd be talking, negotiating.
Spinning it out. I have the priority as the two blokes. If we get the family out that's a bonus. Hitting those two buggers in there is what we're here for.'
Jimmy's eyes had seldom left the house. Its very ordinariness fascinated him. Uninteresting, unremarkable, undistinguished. Forty-nine others like it in the road. An inhabited box. Lived in by people who were stereotype-produced as the bricks and mortar they surrounded themselves with. And their visitors, they also were from the depths of mediocrity, without identity - totally irrelevant without the guns and the grenades. The only things of significance about them were their rifles and the explosives.
But that to Jimmy was muscle, that was the core of terrorism. It was this power that lifted the nonentity on to the pedestal he sought. Jimmy had heard that in a lecture in the department, had listened - which was rare - and agreed. Behind him was the Home Secretary, arms either akimbo or flattened against his backside as he looked solemnly at the tarmac and heard out the Assistant Commissioner. Only one reason he's here, thought Jimmy, the hardware. Doesn't matter how screwed up are the little bastards with their hands on it, the hardware brings the big men out. To all of them standing round the house with their guns and their dogs and their truncheons McCoy and the Arab were just pictures, two-dimensional, black and white. Not to Jimmy. Jimmy had seen them, seen the character of their faces, the shape of their mouths, the slouch of their movements. And Jimmy had tried to kill them that evening, counted himself unlucky that he hadn't.
It tied them together, Jimmy and McCoy and the Arab, in a perverse but brutal liaison. And they had seen him, twenty yards away, and there had been the rifle fire and the thrown grenade. So they knew each other, understood the stake money. When he looked away from the house Jimmy could see the SAS men making their preparations.
But these were outsiders, not a part of it till little more than an hour earlier when their helicopter had lifted off from the far west.
Jimmy walked across the road to where the army officer stood, concentrating on his note-book. He tapped the other man's shoulder and pushed forward his identity card. The officer glanced at it, and acknowledged him by diverting his gaze to Jimmy's eyes. He's impatient, the bastard.
'Jimmy's the name. From the Security Services.'
'George Martin, Captain.'
'I've been on this one. Full time. Since the flap started.
I'd like to go along with you.'
There was a faint smile at the extremes of Martin's mouth. Not quite as tall as Jimmy, looking up at him.
Unsettling, unhelpful, difficult to communicate. Jimmy went on, 'I'd like to go into the house with you. I know what they both look like, could be of use to you.'
The smile broadened. 'Sorry, father, no passengers this time round. If you want to come and identify them after there'll be no problem.'
'Don't give me the father crap .. .'
'Arid don't get in my way. We've work, and no time . . . '
'Listen,' said Jimmy, face close to the soldier's. 'I'm in the protection team. Right beside Sokarev, the Israeli, this evening, appointed to guard him.'
'You're a touch off course then. Nobody told us he'd joined the party in there. I'd have thought your best place was at the hotel holding your baby's hand. Must be looking for a bit of a lullaby after the hoop you put him through tonight.'
Your cool's going, Jimmy. Double fast, like it always does with these uptight swine, if it hadn't been for me he'd be in the morgue now. And when you get in there you'll find one of the bastards half-dead with my bullet in him . . .'
'Come to the wrong chap, then. It's the Birthday Honours you're looking for. I don't hand medals out. Right now I'm busy, got my hands full, and no one goes in alongside my team. Understood?'
'You stupid bastard,' said Jimmy.
The captain smiled again, almost a laugh, and walked away.
It took Jimmy some minutes to find Jones. He was in a group among men of equal status, discussing the problems that confronted them. How to introduce before the scheduled dawn attack the fish-eyed visual surveillance lens that would arrive in a few hours from London, the merits of the various audio-electronic devices that were available, the question of news releases. Jones was rarely in such company, unfamiliar with the bright excitement his companions felt at whiling their evening away waiting for whatever disaster or success the morning might bring. He felt his years shackled to the desk had cheated him of something he vaguely saw as precious. Too much time on paperwork, while the knowledge of the techniques that dominated the world of his new companions was denied him. That he was accepted among them pleased him, but he recognized it was not because of his contribution but through his rank and title. And then Jimmy was at his side, pulling at his coat, just as he was in mid-sentence, and drawing him away. Jones saw the warning signs, noticed the blink in Jimmy's left upper eyelid, knew it from years back. And Jimmy launched off: 'Bloody army, bloody pigs.
I've been with this one right the way through, did you well tonight, bloody well, and now I want to go in there and finish the bloody thing, and that little prig, the bloody army man, treats me like I'm out for some bloody Cook's Tour. All patronizing and "Come in when we've finished"
and that crap.'
'What do you want to go in for, Jimmy?' said Jones.
'To finish the bloody thing, finish what started this evening.'
'Be in at the killing, right? That's what you want?'
'Right first time. I bloody started and . . . '
it's not a quota job, Jimmy-boy. You don't need notches on your pension book. What's the matter, short this year on your numbers? You're not a policeman. You h
aven't got to get twenty traffic bookings a month to hold down a reputation.'
'You mean you're not going to tell them to count me in?' There was doubt in his voice. Jones had always backed him in the past. Why different now?
'Of course I'm not. What do you expect me to say? I've got a man on my books who's a bit short of stiffs this month. Comes out in a rash if he doesn't nab a couple each thirty days. Snap out of it, Jimmy. You've had your scene tonight, done well. You should be off home, and in your pit by now and sleeping so you're not a zombie tomorrow when God knows what happens.'
'Straight bloody heave, then?'
if you see it that way, Jimmy, that's your problem. But do us all a favour and shove back to town so you're not knackered in the morning.'
'I thought there'd be some bloody clout from you,'
Jimmy was shouting, his words carrying across the still of the night, loud enough for those who could not avoid hearing to shuffle their feet and cough.
Jimmy swung on his heel and walked through the rope cordon, side-stepped the newspaper and television photographers, past the sightseers who would wait till there was any action of any sort at whatever advanced hour. He walked down the hill toward the town. There would be a taxi rank there and then there would be the hotel close to the flat where the night porter would fix him up with a half bottle. As he went he wondered about the life and times inside Number 2.5. He thought of McCoy with the hole in him, and of the Arab. Pictured the faces as he'd seen them in the glare of his headlights the moment before he'd fired. Wondered how they'd cope when the military came in. Wanted to be there, missing his bloody treat, and God he'd deserved the party. The tin that he kicked in his frustration careered clumsily and raucously down the road in front of him.
She knew that if she moved McCoy would wake. It was awkward, half-propped on one arm, and lying across the narrow width of the bed, with the weight of his shoulder and his head flattened against her stomach. His sleep was light, punctuated by convulsions when he twisted his body over from right to left, felt the pain, and swung back on to the undamaged arm. The wound through the upper chest was near to her head and it oozed strange and unknown fluids that showed in the half-light as opaque dribblings.
The Glory Boys Page 28