by Glenn Meade
“I’m sure I could think of something.”
She laughed. “I’m sure we both could.”
“OK, let’s see how good the security really is. Better get your special pass ready.”
She swung the Jeep towards the hotel. The long avenue leading up to it had two heavily manned security checkpoints at each end of the track, a hundred yards apart. The road itself was blocked off by red-and-white pole barriers, and there were barbed-wire runs and several machine-gun emplacements either side of the track. A sign warned OFF LIMITS TO ALL PERSONNEL! STRICTLY NO ENTRY!
At the first checkpoint a burly American army captain stepped forward and told them to switch off the engine. He examined their papers thoroughly, including the special passes for the compound which the general had arranged for them to be issued with at GHQ, then went to use the telephone in the sentry hut, while half a dozen armed soldiers thoroughly checked the Jeep, using a mirror on a long pole to study the underside of the vehicle.
The officer finally came back, handed them their papers, and saluted. “Everything’s in order, sir. You’re expected. I’ll have one of my men accompany you to the hotel.”
“That won’t be necessary, Captain.”
The officer smiled knowingly. “Procedure, sir. Without an escort, the men at the next checkpoint are liable to blow your heads off without asking questions.”
• • •
They drove forward to the second checkpoint, a sergeant with an M3 machine pistol riding in the backseat. The same security drill was repeated with the same thoroughness before they pulled up at the hotel entrance and parked in the special visitors’ parking lot opposite the main entrance.
A half-dozen Sherman tanks and armored cars were parked near the front, and sandbagged machine-gun emplacements and antiaircraft batteries had been set up on the roof and around the grounds. The place was a hive of activity, dispatch riders coming and going. There was another security checkpoint in operation in the hotel reception area. It bristled with American and British military police, and near the front of the hotel a detail of army engineers and carpenters was busily testing a mobile ramp, a wood-and-metal contraption on wheels which Weaver guessed was to help get Roosevelt’s wheelchair speedily up and down the steps.
“All very impressive,” he said to the sergeant as he climbed out. “And definitely not the kind of place where you try to sneak past the concierge at 4:00 a.m.”
“You ain’t seen the half of it, sir. We’ve put a ring of steel around the area. Watertight ain’t the word.”
A grim-looking General Clayton came briskly down the hotel steps, Sanson behind him, accompanied by a tired-looking British major with a mustache. Weaver saluted.
“You wanted to see me, sir?”
“Get back in the Jeep, Harry. We need to talk,” Clayton said gruffly, and climbed into the rear, Sanson and the major crowding in beside him. The general made the introduction. “Meet Major Blake. He’s with SIS.”
Blake offered Weaver his hand. “Pleasure to meet you, sir.”
Sanson said brusquely, “Perhaps it’s time you got the guided tour, Weaver. We can talk on the way.” He nodded to Helen Kane. “Take her away, Helen. And be careful where you drive. Some of the areas around here are mined.”
• • •
It took twenty minutes to drive around the security compound. Weaver saw that the entire hotel and almost a quarter square mile of the surrounding desert had been ringed with a barbed-wire perimeter fence, dotted with machine-gun emplacements, and was patrolled by armed guards. Army engineers were still erecting tents on the Mena House grounds to accommodate the large numbers of troops. Just beyond the protection of the camp, the Sphinx and the pyramids stood as a majestic backdrop.
“We’ve got in excess of a thousand men guarding the area,” Clayton explained. “By the time the president arrives this place is going to be sealed up as tight as Fort Knox. Each of the delegates will have his own private quarters and additional personal security, depending on rank and status. Added to that, the president will have twenty Secret Service men protecting him, working round-the-clock shifts. And nobody, but nobody, gets inside the area without the proper papers. From this morning, there’s a ten-square-mile air exclusion zone patrolled by the RAF and our own boys from the U.S. airbase here in Cairo, and enough antiaircraft batteries to take out half the Luftwaffe. If anyone dares enter the zone they get blasted out of the sky, no questions asked.”
“May I ask where the president will be quartered, sir?”
“In one of the hotel suites. If we have to move him for security reasons, it’ll be to the ambassador’s private villa, a mile from here. Like the compound, it’ll be heavily guarded, but by our own boys. As for the hotel, all employees have been replaced temporarily with military personnel, with the exception of the manager. The Arab staff have all been given a paid holiday. We even had to move several local Bedouin families off their land for the duration. Which brings us to our Arab friend.”
The general looked stern, his displeasure evident. “What happened was a disaster. You’ll have to do a lot better, Harry.”
They had come full circle, and Helen Kane pulled up back in the hotel parking lot. Weaver saw that the army engineers had just finished working on the special wheelchair ramp, and two of them wheeled it off to one side.
Clayton sighed as he climbed out of the Jeep. “There’s also been a very worrying development. Major Blake, I guess you’d better explain.”
The major addressed Weaver. “Late last night, one of our intelligence people in Stockholm received an important message, passed through a Swedish intermediary from a high-ranking German source. The information said clearly that the Germans intend to kill the U.S. president and British prime minister.”
Weaver frowned grimly. “How?”
“The details are pretty sparse, but it seems their intelligence knows for certain that both men will arrive in Cairo sometime before the twenty-second, and they’ve devised a plan to kill them. A specialist German team to set up the operation was to be sent to Egypt within forty-eight hours. Our Swedish contact received the information yesterday evening. So that means it could be any time from then until tomorrow tonight.” Blake paused. “That’s all we know, sir.”
Weaver turned pale. “I see.”
“I guess this puts a serious new perspective on things,” said Clayton. “It seems your fears about this Arab were correct all along. We’ve put extra coastal patrols in the air from this morning, as well as the air exclusion zone. There’s some pretty lousy weather due to hit the northern Med over the next couple of nights, a deterrent in itself, but we can’t be too careful. The Krauts are desperate enough to try anything.”
“And not to be treated with kid gloves,” Sanson remarked. “Or wouldn’t you agree, Weaver?”
Weaver didn’t reply, and Clayton said, “You look like you’ve got something on your mind, son. Spit it out.”
“There’s nothing, sir,” Weaver replied.
Clayton said to the others, “Lieutenant, gentlemen, will you excuse us? Let’s take a walk, Harry.”
He led Weaver a short distance towards the gardens. “I’m not going to pussyfoot around, son. I get the feeling you and Sanson don’t see eye to eye.”
“Sir?”
“He told me what happened with Berger. Beating a prisoner isn’t exactly your kind of ball game, but it’s war, Harry, and we’re all tired of it. Like I said, Sanson’s had a lot more experience in these matters. And he gets results. So from now on, you’ll just have to bow to his judgment. He’s in the driver’s seat. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If the Krauts are going to try anything, bottom dollar it’s going to happen real soon. Gabar, or whoever the guy is, has got to be involved in some way, so I’m putting it up to you and Sanson to stop this thing in its tracks. Whatever resources you need, you’ve got. If this Kraut team isn’t shot out of the skies first, I want this whole sorry business wrapped up, put in a box, and buri
ed.”
“I understand, sir.”
“I sure hope so, Harry. The president arrives in thirty-six hours. I want to see progress. You find our Arab friend, and find him fast, or you’ll be walking the plank of this one, got it?”
25
* * *
GIZA
20 NOVEMBER, 4:00 P.M.
The village of Nazlat as-Saman was no more than a collection of mud-brick houses and ramshackle shops along a dusty main street. The pyramids stood several hundred yards away, and the village existed only because of the tiny shops selling trinkets and an assortment of cheap leather goods to visiting tourists.
Harvey Deacon’s car was covered in dust, and as soon as he halted, a half-dozen ragged, barefoot village children crowded round the Packard. He beckoned the toughest-looking boy and gave him ten piastres.
“You get another ten when I return. Allow anyone to touch my car and I’ll cut your ears off.”
Deacon patted the boy’s cheek and turned into a flagged courtyard with a couple of fig trees on either side. It brought him to the far end of the village. He walked across the unpaved road towards the pyramids. The ancient site was on a plateau with a sweeping view of the Nile valley, and he started to walk up the incline, past a scattered herd of goats cropping at the sparse grass near the edge of the desert. He noticed that sandbags were still in place in front of the Sphinx, shielding the human face of the ancient god of death, a blast wall built by the British to protect the monument from German aerial bombing.
The site was busy. Several military staff cars and a dozen or more horse-drawn gharries were parked nearby. Groups of American GIs and British squaddies who had traveled out from the city in the hired gharries were having their photographs taken sitting on Bedouin camels, while dozens of officers and civilians wandered among the ancient mastabas—large rectangular stones that marked the tombs of the pharaohs’ nobles and royal princesses—pestered endlessly by local villagers trying to sell them trinkets and paper fans, or offering their services as guides. Most of the tombs dated from the fourth and fifth dynasties, in the third millennium BC. Deacon knew that many had already been excavated, but the work was painfully slow and ongoing, and groups of Arab students and archeologists were still busily digging among the ruins of several.
There were no troops guarding any part of the site, and the only military presence was the off-duty soldiers. He walked farther up the incline and halted near the top. To the south he could make out the distant outline of the Sakkara pyramids. He shielded his eyes from the strong sun and stood there, pretending to admire the view down to the Nile. When he was sure no one was watching him, he turned casually towards the north.
The Mena House compound lay below, less than half a kilometer away. He stared hard at the view, made a careful mental note of everything he could see—the outline of the perimeter, the machine-gun emplacements, and the daunting sight of several tanks and armored cars parked in front of the hotel entrance. He would add any differences he spotted to the observation notes he had already made over the last few days, and that night he would send off his signal, informing Berlin he was ready.
What happened at the Imperial still bothered him, but he had made up his mind that it wouldn’t deflect his work. He still couldn’t understand how the army had located Hassan—it had to have been luck, or chance—but he reasoned that they’d have their work cut out from now on trying to find him. There was nothing to link Tarik Nasser back to either of them. And the man was safely out of the way—dead from a heart attack. A phone call to the hotel on the pretense of booking a room, and a few gentle questions posed to the gullible clerk who answered had told him enough to figure out what had happened. Feeling reasonably pleased with himself, he walked back down to the village.
The boy was still there, scratching himself as he sat in the sun, guarding the Packard. Deacon tossed him another ten piastres, climbed in, started the engine, and headed south for Shabramant airfield.
5:00 P.M.
When Weaver returned to GHQ, he went to his office and sat at his desk, totally confused. The handful of staff at the Imperial had been thoroughly questioned, and it was obvious they knew nothing about Gabar. The room had been searched and no personal effects had been found. There were no clues, nothing more to go on that might help them. Briggs had barely glimpsed the Arab climbing onto the roof from the fire escape—or at least he thought it was him—except to note that the man appeared to be wearing a suit, not a djellaba, and he hadn’t got a look at his face before he challenged him and fired two warning shots. None of the questioned guests had admitted seeing anyone resembling Gabar. But Weaver knew it had to be him.
The city brothels were being visited by the police, as well as the almshouses, and the army was mounting mobile checkpoints in every district, but time was fast running out. He glanced at his desk, at the mound of paperwork he’d been ignoring for the last five days. His eye caught sight of the photograph taken at Sakkara, and for no particular reason he picked it up, looked at the faces of Rachel Stern and Jack Halder. It all seemed such a long time ago, and a happier time.
“Get out of this black mood, Harry,” he scolded himself. He replaced the photograph on his desk and pressed the intercom. Helen Kane came in. “What’s happening with the checks on the hotels, Helen?”
“They were completed this afternoon.”
“And?”
“I’m afraid there’s been nothing. They’ve drawn a blank.”
Weaver sighed. He could think of nothing else to do. He was exhausted, had barely slept or eaten since returning from Bitter Lakes. “Where’s Lieutenant Colonel Sanson?”
“He left word to say he’s gone to RAF GHQ. It’s something to do with the air patrols the general spoke about. He said he shouldn’t be long.”
Weaver’s neck hurt but he didn’t want to take any more morphine. It made him drowsy, and it became difficult to think straight. “The files on Arab sympathizers, I want to have a look at them again. I guess we’ll have to skip dinner. Unless we try the Kalafa? Then we can come back here and trawl through the files together.”
The Kalafa was only a street away. The food wasn’t up to much and the cheap restaurant was usually packed with military staff, but Helen Kane smiled at the offer. “I’ll leave word with the duty officer where we’ll be, in case anything comes in.”
4:45 P.M.
Deacon observed the airfield as he drove past the approach road. There was no proper fence, just a barbed-wire perimeter, no more than a meter and a half high, and he could see the dirt runway with a couple of barrack huts and two hangars nearby, two old Gloster Gladiators and another biplane of some sort parked on the tarmac.
It was his second journey out to Shabramant in the last three days, and nothing had changed. The two sentry huts at the entrance were still manned by a pair of Royal Egyptian Air Force privates, sitting in the shade out of the blazing sun, swatting away flies with their paper fans. They looked up lazily as Deacon drove by, barely showing interest.
Apart from a couple of mechanics tinkering away at one of the planes, there appeared to be little activity on the airfield. He knew from Captain Rahman that it was used mainly for training flights—there were no navigational aids, and during the day the place was never manned by more than two dozen men. At night even fewer. By 6:00 p.m. and usually earlier, all of the officers had returned to Cairo, while only half a dozen soldiers remained behind on sentry duty. Deacon knew that even then, security was pathetic. According to Rahman, some of the guards had a habit of disappearing into the local town after hours or cycling home to the city for the night.
The airfield was perfect—a straight run from there to Giza and the Mena House, a distance of no more than five miles. The question was, could it be safely secured and held until the SS paratroops landed, and without alerting trouble?
Deacon drove past the field and on for two miles towards the dusty little town of Shabramant, where he wasted twenty minutes buying fresh vegetables in the
local market, then did a U-turn and came back, heading toward Cairo as the sun began to set.
When he was almost past the airfield again, he had to halt for several minutes until a wizened old man herded some goats across his path, ushering them towards the rolling, parched landscape across the road from the camp. As Deacon sat there patiently, he used the time to etch again in his mind everything he could see, to verify the notes and drawings he had already made from memory: the distance from the sentry posts to the barrack huts, the hangar, and airfield; the overhead telephone lines that ran up from the village, and the radio aerial on top of one of the buildings.
But what he failed to see was the motorcyclist who had followed him at a good distance from Cairo and stopped a safe five hundred yards behind, observing the Packard through a pair of powerful British army field glasses.
5:30 P.M.
The Kalafa was busy, but they got a table near the door. The food was lousy—greasy and overcooked—and as they finished their coffee, Weaver said, “I guess we haven’t seen much of each other these last few days. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” She put a hand on his. “When this is over, we’ll make up for it.”
The restaurant door opened and Sanson strode up to their table. “There you are, Weaver. Could you excuse us for a moment, Helen? I’d like a private word.”
She blushed, took her hand away. “Of course. I’d better be getting back anyway.” She looked at Weaver, embarrassed. “I’ll get those files ready for you, sir.”
When she left, Sanson removed his cap, placed it on the table, and took her chair. “All very cozy. I’m surprised you have time for that sort of thing in a crisis like this.”
“We came to eat. What’s on your mind?”
“I’ve spoken with RAF command. They’ll let us know immediately if anything turns up. One of us had better stay in the office overnight, in case anything comes in. I thought I’d allow you the honor.”
