Triple

by Ken Follett

  He was wearing rubber soles, but he put on rubber gloves as an additional precaution for the next task. The cables to the ship's radio mast ran through a pipe along the deckhead above him. With a small hacksaw pilfered from the engine room Tyrin cut away a six-inch section of the pipe, exposing the cables. He took a tap from the power cable to the power input of the transmitter, then connected the aerial socket of his radio with the signal wire from the mast.

  He switched on the radio and called Moscow.

  His outgoing signals would not interfere with the ship's radio because he was the radio operator and it was unlikely that anyone else would attempt to send on the ship's equipment. However, while he was using his own radio, incoming signals would not reach the ship's radio room; and he would not hear them either since his set would be tuned to another frequency. He could have wired everything so that both radios would receive at the same time, but then Moscow's replies to him would be received by the ship's radio, and somebody might notice . . . Well, there was nothing very suspicious about a small ship taking a few minutes to pick up signals. Tyrin would take care to use his radio only at times when no traffic was expected for the ship.

  When he reached Moscow he made: Checking secondary transmitter.

  They acknowledged, then made: Stand by for signal from Rostov. All this was in a standard KGB code.

  Tyrin made: Standing by, but hurry.

  The message came: Keep your head down until something happens. Rostov.

  Tyrin made: Understood. Over and out. Without waiting for their sign-off he disconnected his wires and restored the ship's cables to normal. The business of twisting and untwisting bare wires, even with insulated pliers, was time-consuming and not very safe. He had some quick-release connectors among his equipment in the ship's radio room: he would pocket a few and bring them here next time to speed up the process.

  He was well satisfied with his evening's work. He had made his nest, he had opened his lines of communication, and he had remained undiscovered. All he had to do now was sit tight; and sitting tight was what he liked to do.

  He decided to drag in another cardboard box to put in front of the radio and conceal it from a casual glance. He opened the door and shined his flashlight into the main store--and got a shock.

  He had company.

  The overhead light was on, casting restless shadows with its yellow glow. In the center of the storeroom, sitting against a grease drum with his legs stretched out before him, was a young sailor. He looked up, just as startled as Tyrin and--Tyrin realized from his face--just as guilty.

  Tyrin recognized him. His name was Ravlo. He was about nineteen years old, with pale blond hair and a thin white face. He had not joined in the pub-crawls in Cardiff, yet he often looked hung over, with dark discs under his eyes and a distracted air.

  Tyrin said, "What are you doing here?" And then he saw.

  Ravlo had rolled up his left sleeve past the elbow. On the deck between his legs was a phial, a watch-glass and a small waterproof bag. In his right hand was a hypodermic syringe, with which he was about to inject himself.

  Tyrin frowned. "Are you diabetic?"

  Ravlo's face twisted and he gave a dry, humorless laugh.

  "An addict," Tyrin said, understanding. He did not know much about drugs, but he knew that what Ravlo was doing could get him discharged at the next port of call. He began to relax a little. This could be handled.

  Ravlo was looking past him, into the smaller store. Tyrin looked back and saw that the radio was clearly visible. The two men stared at one another, each understanding that the other was doing something he needed to hide.

  Tyrin said, "I will keep your secret, and you will keep mine."

  Ravlo gave the twisted smile and the dry, humorless laugh again; then he looked away from Tyrin, down at his arm, and he stuck the needle into his flesh.

  The exchange between the Coparelli and Moscow was picked up and recorded by a U.S. Naval Intelligence listening station. Since it was in standard KGB code, they were able to decipher it. But all it told them was that someone aboard a ship--they did not know which ship--was checking his secondary transmitter, and somebody called Rostov--the name was not on any of their files--wanted him to keep his head down. Nobody could make any sense of it, so they opened a file titled "Rostov" and put the signal in the file and forgot about it.

  Chapter Twelve

  When he had finished his interim debriefing in Cairo, Hassan asked permission to go to Syria to visit his parents in the refugee camp. He was given four days. He took a plane to Damascus and a taxi to the camp.

  He did not visit his parents.

  He made certain inquiries at the camp, and one of the refugees took him, by means of a series of buses, to Dara, across the Jordanian border, and all the way to Amman. From there another man took him on another bus to the Jordan River.

  On the night of the second day he crossed the river, guided by two men who carried submachine guns. By now Hassan was wearing Arab robes and a headdress like them, but he did not ask for a gun. They were young men, their soft adolescent faces just taking on lines of weariness and cruelty, like recruits in a new army. They moved across the Jordan valley in confident silence, directing Hassan with a touch or a whisper: they seemed to have made the journey many times. At one point all three of them lay flat behind a stand of cactus while lights and soldiers' voices passed a quarter of a mile away.

  Hassan felt helpless--and something more. At first he thought that the feeling was due to his being so completely in the hands of these boys, his life dependent on their knowledge and courage. But later, when they had left him and he was alone on a country road trying to get a lift, he realized that this journey was a kind of regression. For years now he had been a European banker, living in Luxembourg with his car and his refrigerator and his television set. Now, suddenly, he was walking in sandals along the dusty Palestine roads of his youth: no car, no jet; an Arab again, a peasant, a second-class citizen in the country of his birth. None of his reflexes would work here--it was not possible to solve a problem by picking up a phone or pulling out a credit card or calling a cab. He felt like a child, a pauper and a fugitive all at the same time.

  He walked five miles without seeing a vehicle, then a fruit truck passed him, its engine coughing unhealthily and pouring smoke, and pulled up a few yards ahead. Hassan ran after it.

  "To Nablus?" he shouted.

  "Jump in."

  The driver was a heavy man whose forearms bulged with muscle as he heaved the truck around bends at top speed. He smoked all the time. He must have been certain there would not be another vehicle in the way all night, driving as he did on the crown of the road and never using the brake. Hassan could have used some sleep, but the driver wanted to talk. He told Hassan that the Jews were good rulers, business had prospered since they occupied Jordan, but of course the land must be free one day. Half of what he said was insincere, no doubt; but Hassan could not tell which half.

  They entered Nablus in the cool Samaritan dawn, with a red sun rising behind the hillside and the town still asleep. The truck roared into the market square and stopped. Hassan said goodbye to the driver.

  He walked slowly through the empty streets as the sun began to take away the chill of the night. He savored the clean air and the low white buildings, enjoying every detail, basking in the glow of nostalgia for his boyhood: he was in Palestine, he was home.

  He had precise directions to a house with no number in a street with no name. It was in a poor quarter, where the little stone houses were crowded too close together and nobody swept the streets. A goat was tethered outside, and he wondered briefly what it ate, for there was no grass. The door was unlocked.

  He hesitated a moment outside, fighting down the excitement in his belly. He had been away too long--now he was back in the Land. He had waited too many years for this opportunity to strike a blow in revenge for what they had done to his father. He had suffered exile, he had endured with patience, he had nursed
his hatred enough, perhaps too much.

  He went in.

  There were four or five people asleep on the floor. One of them, a woman, opened her eyes, saw him and sat up instantly, her hand under the pillow reaching for what might have been a gun.

  "What do you want?"

  Hassan spoke the name of the man who commanded the Fedayeen.

  Mahmoud had lived not far from Yasif Hassan when they were both boys in the late Thirties, but they had never met, or if they had neither remembered it. After the European war, when Yasif went to England to study, Mahmoud tended sheep with his brothers, his father, his uncles and his grandfather. Their lives would have continued to go in quite different directions but for the 1948 war. Mahmoud's father, like Yasif's, made the decision to pack up and flee. The two sons--Yasif was a few years older than Mahmoud--met at the refugee camp. Mahmoud's reaction to the ceasefire was even stronger than Yasif's, which was paradoxical, for Yasif had lost more. But Mahmoud was possessed by a great rage that would allow him to do nothing other than fight for the liberation of his homeland. Until then he had been oblivious of politics, thinking it had nothing to do with shepherds; now he set out to understand it. Before he could do that, he had to teach himself to read.

  They met again in the Fifties, in Gaza. By then Mahmoud had blossomed, if that was the right word for something so fierce. He had read Clausewitz on war and Plato's Republic, Das Kapital and Mein Kampf, Keynes and Mao and Galbraith and Gandhi, history and biography, classical novels and modern plays. He spoke good English and bad Russian and a smattering of Cantonese. He was directing a small cadre of terrorists on forays into Israel, bombing and shooting and stealing and then returning to disappear into the Gaza camps like rats into a garbage dump. The terrorists were getting money, weapons and intelligence from Cairo: Hassan was, briefly, part of the intelligence backup, and when they met again Yasif told Mahmoud where his ultimate loyalty lay--not with Cairo, not even with the pan-Arab cause, but with Palestine.

  Yasif had been ready to abandon everything there and then--his job at the bank, his home in Luxembourg, his role in Egyptian Intelligence--and join the freedom fighters. But Mahmoud had said no, and the habit of command was already fitting him like a tailored coat. In a few years, he said--for he took a long view--they would have all the guerrillas they wanted, but they would still need friends in high places, European connections, and secret intelligence.

  They had met once more, in Cairo, and set up lines of communication which bypassed the Egyptians. With the Intelligence Establishment Hassan had cultivated a deceptive image: he pretended to be a little less perceptive than he was. At first Yasif sent over much the same kind of stuff he was giving to Cairo, principally the names of loyal Arabs who were stashing away fortunes in Europe and could therefore be touched for funds. Recently he had been of more immediate practical value as the Palestinian movement began to operate in Europe. He had booked hotels and flights, rented cars and houses, stockpiled weapons and transferred funds.

  He was not the kind of man to use a gun. He knew this and was faintly ashamed of it, so he was all the more proud to be so useful in other, nonviolent but nonetheless practical, ways.

  The results of his work had begun to explode in Rome that year. Yasif believed in Mahmoud's program of European terrorism. He was convinced that the Arab armies, even with Russian support, could never defeat the Jews, for this allowed the Jews to think of themselves as a beleaguered people defending their homes against foreign soldiers, and that gave them strength. The truth was, in Yasif's view, that the Palestine Arabs were defending their home against invading Zionists. There were still more Arab Palestinians than Jewish Israelis, counting the exiles in the camps; and it was they, not a rabble of soldiers from Cairo and Damascus, who would liberate the homeland. But first they had to believe in the Fedayeen. Acts such as the Rome airport affair would convince them that the Fedayeen had international resources. And when the people believed in the Fedayeen, the people would be the Fedayeen, and then they would be unstoppable.

  The Rome airport affair was trivial, a peccadillo, by comparison with what Hassan had in mind.

  It was an outrageous, mind-boggling scheme that would put the Fedayeen on the front pages of the world's newspapers for weeks and prove that they were a powerful international force, not a bunch of ragged refugees. Hassan hoped desperately that Mahmoud would accept it.

  Yasif Hassan had come to propose that the Fedayeen should hijack a holocaust.

  They embraced like brothers, kissing cheeks, then stood back to look at one another.

  "You smell like a whore," said Mahmoud.

  "You smell like a goatherd," said Hassan. They laughed and embraced again.

  Mahmoud was a big man, a fraction taller than Hassan and much broader; and he looked big, the way he held his head and walked and spoke. He did smell, too: a sour familiar smell that came from living very close to many people in a place that lacked the modern inventions of hot baths and sanitation and garbage disposal. It was three days since Hassan had used after-shave and talcum powder, but he still smelled like a scented woman to Mahmoud.

  The house had two rooms: the one Hassan had entered, and behind that another, where Mahmoud slept on the floor with two other men. There was no upper story. Cooking was done in a yard at the back, and the nearest water supply was one hundred yards away. The woman lit a fire and began to make a porridge of crushed beans. While they waited for it, Hassan told Mahmoud his story.

  "Three months ago in Luxembourg I met a man I had known at Oxford, a Jew called Dickstein. It turns out he is a big Mossad operative. Since then I have been watching him, with the help of the Russians, in particular a KGB man named Rostov. We have discovered that Dickstein plans to steal a shipload of uranium so the Zionists will be able to make atom bombs."

  At first Mahmoud refused to believe this. He cross-questioned Hassan: how good was the information, what exactly was the evidence, who might be lying, what mistakes might have been made? Then, as Hassan's answers made more and more sense, the truth began to sink in, and Mahmoud became very grave.

  "This is not only a threat to the Palestinian cause. These bombs could ravage the whole of the Middle East."

  It was like him, Hassan thought, to see the big picture.

  "What do you and this Russian propose to do?" Mahmoud asked.

  "The plan is to stop Dickstein and expose the Israeli plot, showing the Zionists to be lawless adventurers. We haven't worked out the details yet. But I have an alternative proposal." He paused, trying to form the right phrases, then blurted it out. "I think the Fedayeen should hijack the ship before Dickstein gets there."

  Mahmoud stared blankly at him for a long moment.

  Hassan thought: Say something, for God's sake! Mahmoud began to shake his head from side to side slowly, then his mouth widened in a smile, and at last he began to laugh, beginning with a small chuckle and finishing up giving a huge, body-shaking bellow that brought the rest of the household around to see what was happening.

  Hassan ventured, "But what do you think?"

  Mahmoud sighed. "It's wonderful," he said. "I don't see how we can do it, but it's a wonderful idea."

  Then he started asking questions.

  He asked questions all through breakfast and for most of the morning: the quantity of uranium, the names of the ships involved, how the yellowcake was converted into nuclear explosive, places and dates and people. They talked in the back room, just the two of them for most of the time, but occasionally Mahmoud would call someone in and tell him to listen while Hassan repeated some particular point.

  About midday he summoned two men who seemed to be his lieutenants. With them listening, he again went over the points he thought crucial.

  "The Coparelli is an ordinary merchant ship with a regular crew?"

  "Yes."

  "She will be sailing through the Mediterranean to Genoa."

  "Yes."

  "What does this yellowcake weigh?"

  "Two hun
dred tons."

  "And it is packed in drums."

  "Five hundred sixty of them."

  "Its market price?"

  "Two million American dollars."

  "And it is used to make nuclear bombs."

  "Yes. Well, it is the raw material."

  "Is the conversion to the explosive form an expensive or difficult process?"

  "Not if you've got a nuclear reactor. Otherwise, yes."

  Mahmoud nodded to the two lieutenants. "Go and tell this to the others."

  In the afternoon, when the sun was past its zenith and it was cool enough to go out, Mahmoud and Yasif walked over the hills outside the town. Yasif was desperate to know what Mahmoud really thought of his plan, but Mahmoud refused to talk about uranium. So Yasif spoke about David Rostov and said that he admired the Russian's professionalism despite the difficulties he had made for him.

  "It is well to admire the Russians," Mahmoud said, "so long as we do not trust them. Their heart is not in our cause. There are three reasons why they take our side. The least important is that we cause trouble for the West, and anything that is bad for the West is good for the Russians. Then there is their image. The underdeveloped nations identify with us rather than with the Zionists, so by supporting us the Russians gain credit with the Third World--and remember, in the contest between the United States and the Soviet Union the Third World has all the floating voters. But the most important reason--the only really important reason--is oil. The Arabs have oil."

  They passed a boy tending a small flock of bony sheep. The boy was playing a flute. Yasif remembered that Mahmoud had once been a shepherd boy who could neither read nor write.

  "Do you understand how important oil is?" Mahmoud said. "Hitler lost the European war because of oil."

  "No."

  "Listen. The Russians defeated Hitler. They were bound to. Hitler knew this: he knew about Napoleon, he knew nobody could conquer Russia. So why did he try? He was running out of oil. There is oil in Georgia, in the Caucasian oilfields. Hitler had to have the Caucasus. But you cannot hold the Caucasus secure unless you have Volgograd, which was then called Stalingrad, the place where the tide turned against Hitler. Oil. That's what our struggle is about, whether we like it or not, do you realize that? If it were not for oil, nobody but us would care about a few Arabs and Jews fighting over a dusty little country like ours."