Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  What difference would that make to the thinking at Mossad?" She considered that. "I'm not certain."

  "If they knew it was Peter Stride impersonating Steven Stride he insisted, "would that make them curious enough to let the meeting go ahead?"

  "Peter, are you suggesting I turn in a report to my control at Mossad ?"

  "Would you do that?"

  "Sweet merciful God," she whispered. "I could be signing your death warrant, Peter my darling." or you could be saving my life."

  "I don't know." She sat up erect in the bed and ran the fingers of both hands through the short dark curls, the lamplight glowed on her skin with a pale, smooth opalescence and the small fine breasts changed shape as she moved her arms. "Oh, Peter, I don't know."

  "It could be our only chance to ever get close to Caliph," he insisted, and the lovely face was naked with indecision.

  "Caliph believes I have killed you, he believes that I have transmitted a warning to him through my brother. He will have his guard as low as ever it will be. We will never have a chance again like this "I am so afraid for you, Peter. I am so afraid for myself without you-" She did not finish it, but pulled up her long naked legs and hugged her knees to her breasts. It was a defensive foetal position.

  "Will you do it?" he asked gently.

  "You want me to tell my control your real identity, to tell him that I believe your real purpose is not to denounce Cactus Flower but some other unknown-"

  "That is right." She turned her head and looked at him.

  "I will do it in exchange for your promise," she decided.

  "What is that?"

  "If I judge from my control at Mossad that you are still in danger, and that they still intend intercepting you before you reach Caliph then I want your promise that you will abandon the attempt. That you will immediately go to where the Lear is waiting and that you will allow Pierre to fly you out of here to a safe place."

  "You will be honest with me?" he asked. "You will judge Mossad's reaction fairly and even if there is a half-decent chance of me reaching Caliph you will allow me to take that chance?" She nodded, but he went on grimly, making certain of it.

  "Swear it to me!"

  "I would not try to prevent you just as long as there is a chance of success."

  "Swear it to me, Magda."

  "On my love for you, I swear it," she said quietly, and he relaxed slightly.

  "And I in turn swear to you that if there is no chance of meeting Caliph I will leave on the Lear." She turned against his chest, wrapping both her arms around his neck.

  "Make love to me, Peter. Now! Quickly! I have to have that at least." As she dressed she went over the arrangements for communicating.

  "I cannot come through the switchboard here I explained why," she told him as she laced the canvas boots.

  "You must stay here, in this room where I can reach you. If there is danger I will send someone to you. It will be somebody I trust. He will say simply. "Magda sent me," and you must go with him. He will take you to Pierre and the Lear jet." She stood up and belted the khaki breeches around her narrow waist, crossing to the mirror to comb out the dark damp tangle of her curls.

  "If you hear nothing from me it will mean that I judge there is still a chance of reaching Caliph-" Then she paused and her expression altered. "Are you armed, Peter?" She was watching him in the mirror as she worked with her hair. He shook his head.

  "I could get a weapon to you a knife, a pistol, And again he shook his head. "They will search me before I am allowed near Caliph.

  If they find a weapon-" He did not have to finish it.

  "You are right, "she agreed.

  She turned back to him from the mirror, buttoning the shirt over the nipples of her breasts, which were still swollen and dark rosy red from their loving.

  "it will all happen very quickly now, Peter. One way or the other it will be over by tomorrow night. I have a feeling here " She touched herself between the small breasts that pushed out the cotton of her shirt. "Now kiss me. I have stayed too long already for the safety of both of us." Peter slept very little after Magda left him, even though he was very tired. A dozen times he started awake during the night with every nerve strung tightly, rigid and sweating in his bed.

  He was up before first light, and ordered one of those strange Israeli breakfasts of salads and hard-boiled eggs with pale green centres to be sent up to his room.

  Then he settled down once more to wait.

  He waited the morning out, and when there had been no message from Magda by noon, the certainty increased that Mossad had decided not to prevent the meeting with Caliph. If there had been any doubt in Magda's mind she would have sent for him. He had a light lunch sent up to the room.

  The flat bright glare of noon gradually mellowed into warm butter-yellow, the shadows crept out timidly from the foot of the palm trees in the garden as the sun wheeled across a sky of clear high aching blue, and still Peter waited.

  When there was an hour left of daylight, the telephone rang again.

  It startled him, but he reached for it quickly.

  "Good evening, Sir Steven. Your driver is here to fetch you," said the girl at the reception desk.

  "Thank you. Please tell him I will be down directly," said Peter.

  He was fully dressed, had been ready all that day to move immediately. He needed only to place the -crocodile skin case in the cupboard and lock it, then he left the room and strode down the corridor to the elevators.

  He had no way of knowing if he was going to meet Caliph, or if he was about to be spirited out of Israel in Magda's Lear jet.

  "Your limousine is waiting outside," the pretty girl at the desk told him. "Have a nice evening."

  "I hope so," Peter agreed. "Thank you." The car was a small Japanese compact, and the driver was a woman,

  plump and grey-haired with a friendly, ugly face like Golda Meir, Peter thought.

  He let himself into the back seat, and waited expectantly for the message, "Magda sent me." Instead, the woman bade him "Shalom Shalom" politely, started the engine, switched on the headlights and drove serenely out of the hotel grounds.

  They swept sedately around the outer walls of the old city in the gathering dusk, and dropped down in the valley of Kidron. Glancing back Peter saw the elegant new buildings of the Jewish quarter rising above the tops of the walls.

  When last he had been in Jerusalem that area had been a deserted ruin, deliberately devastated by the Arabs.

  The resurrection of that holy quarter of Judaism seemed to epitomize the spirit of these extraordinary people, Peter thought.

  It was a good conversational opening, and he remarked on the new development to his driver.

  She replied in Hebrew, clearly denying the ability to speak English. Peter tried her in French with the same result.

  The lady has been ordered to keep her mouth tight shut, he decided.

  The night came down upon them as they skirted the lower slopes of the Mount of Olives, and left the last straggling buildings of the Arab settlements. The lady driver settled down to a comfortable speed, and the road was almost deserted. It dropped gently down through a dark shallow valley, with the crests of a desolate desert landscape humped up on each side of the wide metal led road.

  0 The sky was empty of cloud or haze, and the stars were brighter white and clearer, as the last of the day faded from the western sky behind them.

  The road had been well sign-posted, ever since they had left the city. Their direction was eastward towards the Jordan, the Dead Sea and Jericho and twenty-five minutes after leaving the King David,

  Peter glimpsed in the headlights the signpost on the right-hand side of the road, declaring in English, Arabic and Hebrew that they were now descending below sea level into the valley of the Dead Sea.

  Once again Peter attempted to engage the driver in conversation, but her reply was monosyllabic. Anyway, Peter decided, there was nothing she would be able to tell him. The car was from a hire c
ompany. There was a plastic nameplate fastened onto the dashboard giving the company's name, address and hire rates. All she would know was their final destination and he would know that soon enough himself.

  Peter made no further attempt to speak to her, but remained completely alert; without detectable movement he performed the prejurnp paratrooper exercises, pitting muscle against muscle so that his body would not stiffen with long inactivity but would be tuned to explode from stillness into instant violent action.

  Ahead of them the warning signals of the crossroads caught the headlights, and the driver slowed and signalled the left turn. As the headlights caught the signpost, Peter saw that they had taken the Jericho road, turning away from the Dead Sea, and heading up the valley of the Jordan towards Galilee in the north.

  Now the bull's horns of the new moon rose slowly over the harsh mountain peaks across the valley, and gave enough light to pick out small features in the dry blasted desert around them.

  Again the driver slowed, this time for the town of Jericho itself, the oldest site of human communal habitation on this earth for six thousand years men had lived here and their wastes had raised a mountainous hill hundreds of feet above the desert floor.

  Archaeologists had already excavated the collapsed walls that Joshua had brought crashing down with a blast of his ram's horns.

  "A hell of a trick." Peter grinned in the darkness. "Better than the nuke bomb." Just before they reached the hill, the driver swung off the main road. She took the narrow secondary road between the clustered buildings souvenir stalls, Arab cafes, antique dealers and slowed for the twisting uneven surface.

  They ground up onto higher dry hills in low gear, and at the crest the driver turned again onto a dirt track. Now fine talcum dust filled the interior and Peter sneezed once at the tickle of it.

  Half a mile along the track a notice board stood on trestle legs, blocking the right of way.

  "Military Zone," it proclaimed. "No access beyond this point." A The driver had to pull out onto the rocky verge to avoid the notice, and there were no sentries to enforce the printed order.

  Quite suddenly Peter became aware of the great black cliff face that rose sheer into the starry night ahead of them blotting out half the sky.

  Something stirred in Peter's memory the high cliffs above

  Jericho, looking out across the valley of the Dead Sea; of course, he remembered then this was the scene of the temptation of Christ. How did Matthew record it? Peter cast for the exact quotation: Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them. Had Caliph deliberately chosen this place for its mystical association, was it all part of the quasi-religious image that Caliph had of himself?

  He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up. Did Caliph truly see himself as the heir to ultimate power over all the kingdoms of the world that power that the ancient chroniclers had referred to as "The Sixth Order of Angels'?

  Peter felt his spirits quail in the face of such monumental madness, such immense and menacing vision, compared to which he felt insignificant and ineffectual. Fear fell over him like a gladiator's net, enmeshing his resolve, weakening him. He struggled with it silently, fighting himself clear of its mesh before it could render him helpless in Caliph's all embracing power.

  The driver stopped abruptly, turned in the seat and switched on the cab light. She studied him for a moment.

  Was there a touch of pity in her old and ugly face, Peter wondered?

  "Here,"she said gently.

  Peter drew his wallet from the inner pocket of his blazer.

  "No, No you owe nothing."

  "Toda raba." Peter thanked her in his fragmentary Hebrew, and opened the side door.

  The desert air was still and cold, and there was the sagey smell of the low thorny scrub.

  "Shalom," said the woman through the open window; then she swung the vehicle in a tight turn. The headlights swept the grove of date palms ahead of them, and then turned back towards the open desert.

  Slowly the small car pitched and wove along the track in the direction from which they had come.

  Peter turned his back on it, allowing his eyes to become accustomed to the muted light of the yellow homed moon and the whiter light of the fat desert stars.

  After a few minutes he picked his way carefully into the palm grove. There was the smell of smoke from a dung fire, and the fine blue mist of smoke hung amongst the trees.

  Somewhere in the grove he heard a goat bleat plaintively, and then the high thin wail of a child there must be a Bedouin encampment in the oasis. He moved towards it, and came abruptly into an opening surrounded by the palms. The earth had been churned by the hooves of many beasts, and Peter stumbled slightly in the loose footing and then caught his balance.

  In the centre of the opening was the stone parapet which guarded a deep fresh-water well. There was a primitive windlass set above the parapet and another dark object which Peter could not immediately identify, dark and shapeless, crouching upon the parapet.

  He went towards it cautiously, and felt his heart tumble within him as it moved.

  It was a human figure, in some long voluminous robe that swept the sandy earth, so that it seemed to float towards him in the gloom.

  The figure stopped five paces from him, and he saw that the head was covered by a monk's cowl of the same dark woollen cloth, so that the face was in a forbidding black hole beneath the cowl.

  "Who are you?" Peter demanded, and his voice rasped in his own ears. The monk did not reply, but shook one hand free of the wide sleeve and beckoned to him to follow, then turned and glided away into the palm grove.

  Peter went after him, and within a hundred yards was stepping out hard to keep the monk in sight. His light city shoes were not made for this heavy going, loose sand with scattered outcrops of shattered rock.

  They left the palm grove and directly ahead of them, less than a quarter of a mile away, the cliff fell from the sky like a vast cascade of black stone.

  The monk led him along a rough but well-used footpath, and though Peter tried to narrow the distance between them, he found that he would have to break into a trot to do so for although the monk appeared to be a broad and heavy man beneath the billowing robe, yet he moved lithely and lightly.

  They reached the cliff, and the path zigzagged up it, at such a gradient that they had to lean forward into it. The surface was loose with shale and dry earth becoming progressively steeper. Then underfoot the path was paved, the worn steps of solid rock.

  On one hand the drop away into the valley was deeper always and the sheer cliff on the other seemed to lean out as though to press him over the edge.

  Always the monk was ahead of him, tireless and quick, his feet silent on the worn steps, and there was no sound of labouring breath.

  Peter realized that a man of that stamina and bulk must be immensely powerful. He did not move as you might expect a man of God and prayer to move. There was the awareness and balance of a fighting man about him, the unconscious pride and force of the warrior. With Caliph nothing was ever as it seemed, he thought.

  The higher they climbed, so the moonlit panorama below them became more magnificent, a soaring vista of desert and mountain with the great shield of the Dead Sea a brilliant beaten silver beneath the stars. All the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them, Peter thought.

  They had not paused to rest once on the climb. How high was it, Peter wondered a thousand feet, fifteen hundred perhaps? His own breathing was deep and steady, he was not yet fully extended and the light sweat that de wed his forehead cooled in the night air.

  Something nudged his memory, and he sniffed at the faintly perfumed aroma on the air. It was not steady, but he had caught it faintly once or twice during the climb.

  Peter was plagued by the non-smoker's acute sense of smell; perfumes and odours always had special significance for him and this smell wa
s important, but he could not quite place it now. It nagged at him, but then it was lost in a host of other more powerful odours the smell of human beings in community.

  The smell of cooking smoke, of food and the underlying sickly taint of rotting garbage and primitive sewage disposal.

  Somewhere long ago he had seen photographs of the ancient monastery built into the top of these spectacular Cliffs, the caves and subterranean chambers honeycombed the crest of the rock face, and walls of hewn rock had been built above them by men dead these thousand years.

  Yet the memory of that faint perfumed aroma lingered with Peter, as they climbed the last hundred feet of that terrifying drop and came out suddenly against the stone tower and thick fortification, into which was set a heavy timber door twelve feet high and studded. with iron bolts.

  At their approach the door swung open. There was a narrow stone passageway ahead of them lit by a single storm lantern in a niche at the corner of the passageway.

  As Peter stepped through the gate, two other figures closed on each side of him out of the darkness and he moved instinctively to defend himself, but checked the movement and stood quiescent with his hand half raised as they searched him with painstaking expertise for a weapon.

  Both these men were dressed in single-piece combat suits, and they wore canvas paratrooper boots. Their heads were covered by coarse woollen scarves wound over mouth and nose so only their eyes showed.

  Each of them carried the ubiquitous Uzi sub-machine guns, loaded and cocked and slung on shoulder straps.

  At last they stood back satisfied, and the monk led Peter on through a maze of narrow passages. Somewhere there was the sound of monks at their devotions, the harsh chanting of the Greek Orthodox service. The sound of it, and the smoky cedar wood aroma of burning incense, became stronger, until the monk led Peter into a cavernous, dimly lit church nave hewn from the living rock of the cliff.

  In the gloom the old Greek monks sat like long embalmed mummies in their tall dark wooden pews. Their time-worn faces masked by the great black bushes of their beards. Only their eyes glittered, alive as the jewels and precious metals that gilded the ancient religious icons on the stone walls.