“As soon as you can realistically manage,” Bahai said.
Lurgar nodded gravely. “Very well. Could I go away and have a preliminary look at this now, while you are all here together? Maybe there’s an office somewhere I could use?”
“Good,” Bahai said. “We have some other matters to discuss anyhow. Shall we say, thirty minutes?”
“That would be fine.”
“I’ll find you some space somewhere,” Almagi said, getting up.
Lurgar kept a poker face as he left the room with the intelligence chief. Inside, he was relieved and thankful at no longer having to make a decision.
As he closed the door, he heard Bahai saying to Charon, “What I don’t understand is how the Americans knew all this, when you’ve had a man in there all the time. And…”
They were going to get another surprise, too, he thought to himself. If his guess was right, he was about to set a speed and efficiency record for operations planning.
• • •
The movie was Swedish, and reaching its climax with an orgy of coeds after the graduation dance. Brett had lost count of the number of orifices and protuberances in use. He wasn’t especially interested, but it held everyone else’s attention, and the encouraging suggestions and bawdy comments being shouted from around the room covered his muttered conversion with Hamashad.
“Did you watch McCormick’s speech this afternoon?” Hamashad asked him.
“I did.”
“And?”
“Obviously I’m satisfied. You went to a lot of trouble.”
“That is my job. You were right to be cautious.”
Brett glanced at him quickly. “So, what should I do to get this information out through you? I’ll need to write it down?”
“That will no longer be necessary.”
Brett looked worried. “How come?”
“They want more than just the information. They want you. An Israeli commando unit is being sent in to get you out.”
For a few seconds, Brett was speechless. “When?” he murmured when he had recomposed himself.
“Three days from now, on the evening of the twentieth, immediately after sundown. I will be coming with you.”
“Okay, I’m listening. What’s the plan?”
“We leave separately and meet up outside the camp. There is an airstrip near here, which trucks make trips to regularly…”
CHAPTER 61
An advance party had been dropped by parachute several hours earlier to mark out a landing strip and clear it of rocks and other obstacles. Mel sat on a cramped seat in semidarkness, staring at the dark bulk of the helicopter secured in the cargo bay and listening to the drone of the four Allison engines as the C-130 Hercules transporter flew low through the mountains on the southern fringe of Turkey. Like the other shadowy figures sitting silently or dozing around him, he was wearing a jump-smock over combat fatigues, rubber-soled boots, a woollen cap-comforter on his head, camouflage cream on his face, and cuddling an Uzi 9mm submachine gun against his knees.
An attempt to fool the kind of soldiers he was among wouldn’t have lasted long, and they wouldn’t have appreciated it. He had agreed with Dave that the best policy would be to rely on his existing prestige to carry him, and to make no bones about it. Accordingly, they had announced to the others simply that Mel’s professional skills were in other areas—which was true—that he wasn’t from a military background, and that was that.
“What kind of background are you from?” one of them had asked.
“I sit at a desk,” Mel had told him.
The reply was so incongruous that everyone had taken it as a joke. Obviously his line of business was security sensitive, and Lurgar had made a mistake. They interpreted Mel’s readiness to go with them, nevertheless, as a noble gesture to avoid embarrassing the general, which enhanced Mel’s popularity with them even further. So two of the NCOs had spent a couple of hours the previous day giving Mel a crash course on handling military hardware, and Mel had been pleasantly surprised to find that he wasn’t bad at it.
He still hadn’t fully absorbed the suggestion that the person they were going there to bring out might be Brett. Yet the more he thought about it, the more sense it made. Besides the similarities that Dave had listed, it seemed too coincidental that no body had ever been recovered from the car that went over Devil’s Slide. And thinking about it more, why would a hostile power that had somebody with Brett’s kind of specialized knowledge in its possession want to kill him, when he could be so much more potentially useful in other ways? Some of the things he recalled Stephanie saying made him wonder if, deep down, she had ever really accepted it, but perhaps been unwilling to say so for fear of sounding too much like somebody merely trying to convince herself. He thought back to the five people of six years ago, and of the strange twists of circumstances that we’re bringing them all together again now. All, that was, except one…
The plane banked, and Mel could feel it dropping, then straightening out again. Captain Rachmin came back from the forward compartment and moved along the row of forms hunched in the shadows. “Five minutes to touchdown,” he told them. “Be ready to move.”
Mel checked his pack, equipment, straps, weapons.
The plane landed on rough terrain, bounced, and lumbered to a lurching halt. Its loading ramp was down almost immediately, and the troops began untying the helicopter. Mel squeezed past them and walked down the ramp beneath the aircraft’s tail. It was cold, and the sky clear but with no moon. While the helicopter was being rolled out and its rotor unfolded, he saw in the starlight that they were in a desolate valley with steep sides of broken rock and boulders that appeared ghostly white. Rachmin was talking with the commander of the party that had been dropped earlier. There had been no intrusions, and nothing had flown overhead. Everything was fine. Within a few minutes, the helicopter was ready to fly.
“I bet you didn’t think you’d be joining the army when you got on that plane out of Boston,” Dave’s voice murmured next to him.
The C-130 would wait until the helicopter got back after putting down the ground force, and then fly out with the parachute team. It would return to send out the pickup helicopter the night after next.
The helicopter started smoothly, raising a cloud of white dust from among the rocks underfoot, and the ten-man team—the original nine, plus Mel—climbed in with their weapons and packs. It was a lot more cramped than the Hercules had been. More time dragged by, of darkness, vibration, and hypnotic engine noise. Another leg farther away from the familiar, all-electric world of city streets, warm houses, and people who wore clothes that were picked to look nice.
The flight into Syria lasted less than half an hour. The helicopter landed on crumbly, slatelike rock, and lifted off again as soon as the last man was on the ground. As Mel’s eyes adjusted to the distance, he saw that they were in a depression between two ridges which converged toward a low peak dimly outlined against the sky. As the sound of the motor died away, an uncanny stillness descended, disturbed only by a faint wind. Mel had never felt so far away from everywhere in his life. While Rachmin and the other two squad leaders conferred briefly over maps and compasses in the light of a torch shaded by rocks and a cape, the others adjusted their packs and weapons and waited without talking, eyes and ears probing the surroundings. First priority would be to get clear of the drop zone as quickly as possible.
They moved out in single file, following the valley southeast, spaced well apart but not enough to lose contact in the dark—Ehud’s squad leading, Zvi’s next with Zvi in front, then Mel, then Dave, followed by Haim, a lance corporal, and finally Rafael’s squad bringing up the rear. The pace was brisk but not grueling. The Israelis seemed to glide effortlessly over the broken ground, making no sound other than the occasional crunch of a rock being squeezed down against another. Every time Mel kicked a loose stone and sent it clattering a few inches, it sounded to him like an avalanche.
They edged gradually toward the
ridge on the left, and then angled upward toward its crest over steeply tilted rock slabs and crazily piled boulders, which caused his heels to rub in his boots. Then they crossed the ridge and went down the far slope, still bearing southward, which chaffed his toes. After another mile he was perspiring despite the chill, and his breathing felt labored. His big fear was that he would lose the faint shape constantly retreating at the limit of vision ahead, and then have to flounder helplessly, or worse still, take everyone behind him off in the wrong direction.
But gradually he got his second wind, and as the rhythm insinuated itself into his subconscious, his pace became firmer. Swinging a leg the way one would on a sidewalk was no good. Each foot had to be deliberately planted, in a smooth, catlike motion which in darkness combined the functions of feeling one’s way and moving. Slowly he was getting the hang of it, at first having to consciously direct every step, but feeling it becoming more automatic with repetition. They climbed another slope, steeper this time, a treadmill of fine, deep dust that feet sank into and slid down almost as fast as he tried to push himself up. At the top they stopped for five minutes in a crevice between shattered rocks to empty bladders, wash the dust from their mouths with swigs from water bottles, unwrap chocolate, chew dates. Mel was surprised at how high they seemed to have climbed.
“I said you’d do okay,” Fenner murmured as they shared a nut bar. “How d’you feel?”
Mel’s teeth stood out against his blackened face as he grinned in the starlight. “Just fine.”
That he’d probably have sore feet by morning—and certainly after the second night—he knew already; and there would be more than a little stiffness in places, too. Paratroopers were expected to go through far worse than this for weeks on end, and to arrive in a fit condition to fight. Mel wasn’t sure at this stage if he’d arrive in a fit condition to ride a bicycle. But one fear had left him. He was going to make it.
• • •
A hand was shaking his shoulder. “Mohican, wake up.” Sudden daylight. A sun-bronzed face beneath a woollen cap was staring down at him.
“Uh?… Waddisit?…” It took Mel a few seconds to remember where he was. He shook his head and sat up. Zvi was squatted next to him. The others were asleep among the boulders in a cleft below a rock wall, huddled in capes and smocks, their packs strewn around them and weapons near at hand.
“Ten o’clock. Your turn to stand watch. Take the lower post above the cliff. Jacob will take the upper one. Haim and Meir will relieve you at noon.”
Mel hauled himself to his feet, shivering and flexing his arms to get the circulation moving. His calves were cramping, and he could feel aches in his thighs and waist. “How is everything?”
“There is nothing to report. It has been quiet.”
“Have a good sleep.”
“That will be no problem.”
Zvi took off the binoculars hanging at his neck and handed them to him. Mel took some chocolate from his pack to chew, a carton of orange juice, then picked up his Uzi and clambered down twenty feet over reddish, gritty rock to a niche behind two boulders, with a higher block behind. The position commanded a view of the approach to the bivouac along the ridge, without offering an outline against the sky. He rested the Uzi on the ledge of rock in front of him and blew into his hands and rubbed them together as he surveyed the surroundings.
The ridge rose gently away in front of him and slightly to his right, toward a rounded, barren summit about a mile away—an indifferent pile of shattered rock and tumbled boulders piled haphazardly on each other amid slides of pebble scree, that could have been a piece of the moon and have sat there just as changelessly for just as long.
He was looking along the side of the ridge, which plunged abruptly in a series of knobbly cliffs to a jumble of crags and house-size boulders several hundred feet below, on the upper slopes of a wide valley. Mel swallowed involuntarily as he looked at it. That was the direction they had come from last night. A detour around the ridge would have taken them too far off route, and so they had climbed the cliffs. He was glad they had done it in darkness. Looking at it now in daylight, he wasn’t sure he would have tackled it with such determination had he known what he was doing. Brett’s observation came to mind again: “Confidence is what you feel…” Best forgotten about, now, he decided.
Across the valley to his left, the hills were troubled and chaotic, seeming to bump against each other in constant strife to claw their way to the skyline, with the shadows of clouds rippling across them like waves of creeping scrub. Beyond, in the far distance, a more massive mountain broke free from foothills smothering its base and rose to a snowy summit feathered with clouds. As he looked and his senses attuned themselves to the emptiness and stillness stretching away from him in every direction, a profound feeling of the vastness of it all overcame him. It was difficult to believe that places like Boston, Los Angeles, Cairo, and Tel Aviv existed on the same planet. Stephanie was right. The earth wasn’t overpopulated at all. Far from it. It was simply that people packed themselves by the million into tiny corners of it, and then lost the ability to see beyond the boundaries to their perceptions which they had created.
A movement caught his eye and made him turn his head. A lizard had emerged to see what was trespassing in its domain, and was looking at him inquisitively with one eye from a nearby rock. As he moved, it vanished into a crevice like a piece of trick photography—suddenly there, then gone. And then he noticed other movement. There were flies and slender black beetles; saffron and brown-speckled butterflies fidgeting among clumps of tough, leathery grass that he hadn’t noticed before either. Suddenly there was life all around him: a cluster of pale yellow plants with spiky leaves; tiny violet flowers clinging to hairline cracks in the rocks, surrounded by moss; wild lavender frothing from a chink filled with sand; even the colorless thistles and brittle thornbushes, defiantly preserving themselves against the ravages of the sun and the wind. A shadow wrinkled its way across the folds in the rock, and he looked up to see a hawk spreading sail and rising on some invisible current of air.
He had visited the Grand Canyon with Eva once, in one of his pilgrimages to LA. She had never been there before, either. They had arrived late in the afternoon, intending to see what there was to see and then be on their way, but one look across it had been enough to cause them to check into a hotel. They’d got up early the next morning and walked down to the rim as the mists were clearing, before anyone was around… and just sat there, staring at it. It had taken him two hours just to comprehend what he was looking at. Then a bus had pulled up noisily behind them to digorge a noisy tour group of Australians with cameras and cowboy hats. For five minutes, at the most, they had chattered, jostled, formed up in grinning lines to be photographed—facing the camera, not the Canyon—drunk sodas… and then piled back inside again and disappeared as suddenly as they had come, leaving the silence to close again behind. Eight thousand miles, for that? Mel had often thought. “Oh yes, and that’s me and George at the Grand Canyon.” But it wasn’t. They were never there. They had never seen it.
And what of these hills and deserts that he was staring out over now? History was being written in them that was old before the white civilization existed, and they no doubt looked much the same now as they had then. What did they think of these men who came, snatched a few hours of sleep, and then were gone? How much more was there to see and hear and comprehend out there that he had no inkling of? Perhaps there was something to mysticism after all—it was as good a name for such a sensitivity as any other. He could see how men invented their gods. Not the death-cult God, who was locked up in gold-plated boxes and interred in dingy, tomblike cathedrals. But gods of life and regeneration and perpetuation. The same god as Eva’s.
Solitude distorted time as well as distance. Noon arrived so much sooner than he expected that he almost missed it. He went back up to the bivouac to find that some of the others were awake, sitting, conserving energy. Haim was already moving off to the upper
post to take over from Jacob. Meir was munching a hot breakfast of tomatoes, beans, and pressed meat from compo ration cans. “My watch?” he said as Mel sat down.
“I guess so.”
As Meir got up, he waved toward the mess tin on the stove, sheltered between two rocks. “I fixed some for you too.”
“Wonderful. Thanks.” Mel set the Uzi aside and sat down, rubbing his eyes with his fingers.
“How is it? Is anything happening?”
Mel stopped and stared over his hand as he considered the question. But there was nothing else he could say. “It’s quiet. Everything’s dead out there.”
CHAPTER 62
The sun was getting low, turning the hills and peaks to the west into jagged silhouettes. It was the evening of January nineteen. Ehud’s and Zvi’s squads would be moving out in an hour, leaving Rafael and his two men to pick a landing zone and guide them to it on their return, which was scheduled to be two hours before dawn at the end of the next night. Mel had a blister on his right big toe, another on his heel, and a tender patch on his left ankle, and he spent some time padding them with Band-Aids. The bivouac was located high up, with the only approaches to it visible to a considerable distance from the two sentry posts, and normal nighttime discipline had been relaxed a little. After a day of following the example set by the lizards and lying among the rocks and soaking up the sun, the troops were rested and refreshed. There was more life and banter among them as they sat cleaning the dust out of their weapons and checking slides and catches, getting a last meal inside them of soup, cheese and biscuits, jam pudding, and coffee, and packing kit.
“Did you see any UFOs while you were on watch, Har?”
“You can laugh. They’re up there. You’ll see one day.”
“Come on, let’s be serious.”
“We’ll go to the stars one day, sure, but it will be spaceships that we build ourselves. We don’t need little green men to take us there.”
The Mirror Maze Page 47