“From your background in the war, I know you have had your share of experience with them. You know how those bookworm, staff types could be even more deadly than the ones with all the combat decorations.”
“Like Eichmann.”
“Yes, like our dear friend Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann.” The hands pulled back into the dark and the room was silent for a moment. “This could mean something. We will check it out. Thomson, you have done us a service. We owe you one in return.”
A hand reappeared in the light, holding a slip of paper. He pushed it across the desk. “This is a phone number, for emergencies, and the address of a safe house. Memorize them and then destroy the paper, please. You never can tell when you might need some friends on short notice. Please call first. Someone will always be there. If you learn anything else, you can pass it on to your friend Perper.” With that, the hand made a dismissive gesture. Thomson felt a hand on his shoulder, and he knew the grilling was over. He rose to his feet and let the man with the Uzi nudge him toward the door.
The ride back to the city was a blur. There was so much more Thomson wanted to ask, but he knew neither the old man nor Jani would give him the answers. Soon, the old Peugeot was pulling over to the curb a few blocks from his hotel.
Thomson stepped onto the sidewalk as Jani leaned his head out the window and warned, “The police are watching your hotel. Be careful, Thomson, they cannot be trusted any more than the Germans or your own people… and remember what the old man said. Call us if you learn anything. Right now, we’re the only friends you have in Cairo. So l’chaim, my friend, ‘to life’… I hope you live long.”
“But you won’t be betting on it.”
“No,” he laughed again. “I am far too cynical a man to believe that.”
Thomson got out of the car and looked back at Jani for a moment. Their eyes met, and Thomson could see Jani was serious. He nodded and took a deep breath as he turned away and walked up the empty street, limping along on one shoe and feeling very much alone. Jani was right. The cops were there, and they were not hard to spot. There was a small, plain sedan parked across from his hotel. Inside he could see the tops of two heads in the dim shadows. He continued on to the hotel’s front entrance and into the lobby. It was empty. No cops and no desk clerk, so he continued on to the stairs. With his blood up and deep in thought, he barely noticed the five flights of stairs up to his own floor.
What had he blundered into, Thomson wondered. Was there any chance this really could be an Agency operation? Kilbride sure as hell was sensitive about it. If it was, why hadn’t the pompous bastard just said so? There were a hundred easier ways to call him off than this. Easier, that is, if the operation really did have Agency sanction — if. Ah, screw it, he finally told himself, and screw Kilbride, too. Thomson was angry — good and angry — but he felt alive for the first time in a long time. He was going to keep doing what they trained him to do, whether they wanted him to or not; because it was the only thing he knew how to do. He had something to prove, to himself if no one else. His career? That could not sink any lower, but he still had his self-respect. He still had his instincts, too; and they told him he was right about this one. All he needed was proof, and he knew there was only one place to find it.
When he reached the fifth floor, he turned down the corridor toward his room. He paused at his door and wondered what he would find inside this time — more Goons, another headless corpse, or maybe an arrogant Police Captain with one bad leg. Knowing there was only one way to find out, he turned the knob, let the door swing slowly open, and stepped inside. The room was empty, except for the black oxford shoe he lost in the street fight earlier. Someone had placed it in the center of his bed on top of his neatly folded suit jacket.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Thomson waited until mid-afternoon. Leaving the city should not be that difficult, he thought, not dressed as an eccentric English tourist on a rented motorbike, complete with baggy shorts, a pith helmet, and a picnic basket. Five minutes in the crowded streets and back alleys of the Old Quarter did the rest. He left the police surveillance mired hopelessly in the pushcarts, clutter, and milling crowds, cursing a donkey and their own bad luck. From there, he opened an old Michelin map and steered northeast through the city and then the suburbs until he reached the main highway to Heliopolis. “The City of the Sun” had been built after the turn of the century by the British and for the British, so they could live the good colonial life without having to deal with the local underclasses. It would be a little corner of England, so to speak. From its high plateau, the colonial emperors could ride into the capital each morning and escape back to their safe, white enclave each night. The emperors had retreated to the mother country a decade before, but the aura of the place remained for those with the cash to afford it. The posh villas and apartments of the British were now occupied by the native upper class — wealthy merchants, ministerial Pooh-Bahs and mandarins, and army Colonels with their brightly colored ribbons to commemorate each of their many defeats.
Fifteen miles later, the blistering sun and dry desert air left the skin on Thomson’s hands and face as parched and cracked as old leather. As the first houses on the outskirts of Heliopolis appeared on the shimmering horizon, he swung the motorbike into the shade cast by a scraggly palm tree and reached into the picnic basket. He grabbed one of the canteens he had stashed there and poured half of it down his throat and the other half onto his face. The rush of warm water ran down his chest and soaked his shirt, but even that felt luxuriously refreshing.
On the other side of the road he saw a narrow dirt track branching off from the highway and fading into the low, rocky hills of the desert beyond. The old RAF base was out there somewhere, so he forced his aching rear end back onto the bike, kicked the motor into gear, and went exploring. Before he had traveled the first bumpy mile, the heat of the desert had dried his shirt; and before he had gone the second, he ran into a military police roadblock. There were two Egyptian soldiers asleep in the back of their jeep under a tree; and a third sat on the front bumper, dozing on his rifle. It was hard to tell who was more surprised, Thomson or the MPs. The Egyptian sitting on the bumper jumped into the road and flagged Thomson down with the barrel of his rifle.
“I say,” Thomson protested in his best British accent, “no need for guns, my good man.”
It was hopeless. The MP did not understand a word of English. He grinned and nodded, but he kept motioning with the rifle for Thomson to turn around.
“Oh damn!” Thomson pouted and stomped his foot on the ground, but he had no choice. He wheeled the bike around and headed back up the road, making a mental note of the markings on the jeep’s bumper and smiling. An old, abandoned air base and the roadblock were tangible proof that something was indeed going on out here. Someone was worried enough about security to post guards and cordon off the area. Thomson backtracked to the main highway and pointed the bike toward Heliopolis again. After another mile, he found a second dirt road slicing away into the desert. This time, he had barely gone a mile before he ran into another roadblock. The result was the same, except one of the MPs spoke a bit of broken English.
“Oh, be a sport, old chap,” Thomson pleaded. “I’m a geologist, you see. That’s the Semiramis Fault out there,” he said, making a bold, sweeping gesture toward the empty desert, winging it as he went. “Oil shale — it’s the future, mark my words.”
The MP silenced him with a fierce scowl. “No! Off limits. Go back. Go!”
“Now see here, my good man.” Thomson put his hands on his hips and blustered. “I have friends in the Ministry of…”
“Go! You go!” The guard continued to scowl as he leveled the rifle at Thomson’s chest. From the look in the MP’s eyes, Thomson knew he would love to pull the trigger, so why give him a reason. He quickly backed away, hopped on the motorbike and threw it into gear.
Thomson didn’t get much out of this second encounter; but as he looked back at the MP, he saw the fellow
coughing and cursing in the cloud of choking dust Thomson had left behind. He smiled, but he did not slow until he was well out of sight and halfway back to the main road. He swung the bike off the narrow track and into the soft sand, pushing, pulling, and muscling it a few hundred yards father into the desert until it was hidden behind a low rocky outcrop. He looked around and thought that this would do, as he dropped his aching body onto the hot sand next to the bike and tried to relax. His muscles were still tingling from the bumpy ride and he badly needed some sleep. He shielded his eyes and turned his head slowly to survey the rugged wilderness that lay around him. Waves of heat shimmered off the hard-packed, coppery-red sand. Who would even want this hellhole much less fight a war over it, he wondered, as he glanced at his watch. It was 4:00 p.m., time for a late lunch and a long nap. Judging from the landscape he would need to cross, he would need them both.
When Thomson woke, he felt stiff and cold. Reflecting on his long career, there had to have been times when his old bones didn’t object to sleeping on the hard, bold ground, but he was having trouble remembering that far back. How many wars ago could it have been? Well, he groaned, perhaps “the Harvards” were right after all. He really was too old to be running around in the bush like this.
The shimmering heat of the afternoon sun was long gone now, and the desert night air bore an eerie chill. Overhead, a thin, quarter moon made the night seem even colder. Thomson rose, slapped his arms, and rubbed them hard, amazed at how quickly this blinding oven could become the black inside of a refrigerator. His watch showed nearly 11:00 p.m. and his body had been right. It needed the sleep and this was the biggest chunk he had stolen in over forty-eight hours. He reached to the bottom of the picnic basket. There was a pint of brandy squirreled away down there somewhere; he grinned when he found it, twisted off the cap, and took a big nip.
“Watch out, world. Ready or not, here I come.” Shivering and coughing, he tried to convince himself that he might actually make it. He pulled on a dark shirt and slipped a pair of dark slacks over his cargo shorts, threw a small mountaineering pack over his shoulder, and set off across the scrubby dunes, checking his bearings with an old army compass and the Michelin map. In less than twenty minutes, he noticed a faint white glow above the far horizon and put the compass away. So much for an old, abandoned base, he thought. Something was going on out here, and they don’t need all these lights for maneuvers. He slowed his pace and became more careful. If he ran into the MPs dressed like this, he would never pass for a wandering geologist. He stayed low and followed the terrain, winding through rock-strewn dry creek beds, moving quietly and blending into the night like one more dark shadow until he reached a fence.
It was not new, but it was tall and well maintained, made of chain link and barbed wire with a double coil of concertina wire strung along its top. Like any obstacle, it was not designed to keep a good man out, only to slow him down until someone saw him and help came. That chilly thought upped the ante and made Thomson decide how badly he really wanted in. He did, but he was in no hurry. He pulled a pair of binoculars from his pack and focused them on the compound. In front of him sat dozens of long wooden army barracks. Beyond them, farther inside the compound, stood big groves of palm trees. Peeking out between the trunks and branches was a flicker of lights, as if someone was trying to hide something. That might work during the day but not at night. He cocked an ear and heard the banging of metal on metal and the deep-throated rumble of diesel engines. Through the screen of trees, he could see the dim shapes of men and machines backlit by powerful lights. It had to be a motor pool, he figured. In any army, motor pool sergeants always took great pride in making a lot of noise. True or not, it created the impression of being busy whenever senior officers or inspectors came around.
From a quick look around, Thomson saw the unmistakable outlines of a half-dozen Russian T-34 tanks. Those old iron monsters were now considered small and outdated. In their day, however, they ran in packs and could gang up and smash anything the Germans threw at them, carrying the Red Army on their backs from Moscow to the gates of Berlin. Almost twenty years later, the Russians pawned them off to their Third-World partners like worn-out shoes. Then again, to an infantry grunt, any tank beat no tank at all. There were enough dark places inside that compound to hide a lot of them, and Thomson quickly concluded he had just found the missing tank regiment from the Delta. If he found them this easily; however, Landau had photos he had taken inside the compound and not from out here. As the old man behind the lamp asked, what was so damned important in there that a skilled Israeli spy would risk being caught?
The buildings inside the compound all looked like they dated from the late 1940s, probably built by the British as they garrisoned Egypt after the War to protect the Suez Canal. The bungalows probably had housed the NCOs and their families, since British officers usually lived in town during peacetime. It was not hard to imagine how the now-dilapidated cottages would have looked back then, all spiffy with a coat of fresh paint, window boxes full of petunias, and clotheslines bending under loads of bleached laundry, just like a little touch of England out here in the desert but no longer. As Jeremy said, it had all gone to hell in a handbasket.
Thomson swung the binoculars away and focused them on the gate where the main road entered the compound. It was floodlit, barricaded, and guarded. Once inside the gate, the road branched into three smaller ones. One curved toward Thomson, passing by the barracks; the second went on toward the big buildings at the center of the compound, and the third road curved sharply away until it disappeared into a long row of wood-frame bungalows.
As Thomson crawled away from the fence, he knew he had more questions than answers; so he slipped back into the shadows and slowly worked his way around the outer perimeter of the compound toward the main gate. Every hundred meters he saw a sign hanging on the fence, warning any foolhardy trespasser in both Arabic and English that they would be shot if they ventured any farther. In addition, there were enough guards around to make the threat real. He had already seen at least six heavily armed men patrolling the fence, and he hadn’t covered more than a fraction of its perimeter.
When he got within thirty feet of the main gate, he stopped and lay still on the top of a dune, content to watch and listen. The gate had a pull-down, red-and-white-striped pole that blocked the traffic lanes. The two slouching Egyptian sentries who guarded it looked as though they were being propped up by their rifles. As Thomson lay and watched, it did not take long for his patience to be rewarded. A big sedan came speeding up the road, its headlights illuminating the entire entrance with the glare from its high beams. The sentries quickly looked up. When they recognized the sedan, they braced to attention. At the same time, the door of the guard shack behind them flew open with a loud crash. A short, burly sergeant strode out, glaring at the two guards as he hurried over to the car. There was something odd about him, Thomson thought. He wore the same Egyptian army uniform as the other two, but even from this distance, he looked different. The light was dim, but his skin looked shades paler than the other two. He was older and more muscular; and he didn’t walk, he strutted casually but with the smug confidence of a born soldier.
The sergeant leaned into the driver’s window, laughed, and chatted with whoever was inside, as if they were sharing some old familiar joke. Thomson strained to hear their words above the low rumble of the car’s engine, but all he caught were snatches. “Ja, ja, diese Scheissidioten!” The sergeant nodded and looked at the two guards with contempt. “Alles in Ordnung … Naturlich … Wann? Gemacht.” The sergeant snapped to attention and Thomson swore he heard the man say, “Zu Befehl, Herr Sturmbannführer!”
That sent a shiver down Thomson’s spine, because there was only one military organization in the world that ever used titles like that. It was the German SS. The sergeant snapped his fingers at the guards and they quickly raised the gate. As the sedan passed through the floodlights, Thomson got a brief glimpse inside and saw the same profile and
arrogant smile he had seen the night before. It was his old pal Blondie. The guards quickly dropped the gate back into place, as the red taillights of the sedan sped toward the big buildings in the center of the compound. The German sergeant stood in the road with his hands on his hips, snarling at the two Egyptian sentries for several minutes, and then stormed back into his shack. The two sentries looked at each other and smiled. Soon, they were lounging against the gate again, no more concerned than before. Interesting, Thomson thought, as he silently crept away into the shadows. It was easy to see who was in charge. The Egyptians were playing to form, while the Germans were doing the heavy lifting; and they were worth avoiding.
Thomson made a wide arc around the main gate and reached the fence again near the row of old bungalows. This was the darkest part of the compound, and Thomson did not have to debate his next move. He had already learned a few things, but not nearly enough; he needed to know more. Swinging back around to the fence line, he found a low spot on the side of a low hill, pulled a pair of wire cutters from his pack, and went to work on the chain-link fence. He cut the bottom half-dozen links, enough to allow him to slip underneath and crawl into the compound. Up close, the small bungalows looked even more dilapidated than they had through binoculars. Decades of sun, sand, and neglect had left them gray and drab. Shingles were missing from the roofs, shutters were hanging askew, and the rear porches sagged badly. Even their once proud gardens were neglected, reduced to a few scraggly patches of weeds. That was true for all of them, except the bungalow at the far end. It actually had a garden, small but well kept. Even more surprising, a flowerpot sat on the rear window ledge; and there were curtains on the windows. In this desolate old RAF base, someone had actually hung curtains in the window. “Be it ever so humble,” Thomson muttered and shook his head. Someone actually called this place home; and since that cabin was farthest from the bright lights of the gate, it would do nicely.
Cold War Trilogy - A Three Book Boxed Set: of Historical Spy Versus Spy Action Adventure Thrillers Page 85
