by Ian Barclay
“Because you’re not going to get the chance to. Either you tell me where I can find Bakkush or you die right here where you now stand.”
“No!”
Dartley grinned. “Why do you think I brought you down to a quiet, lonely place?”
“But Pritchett—”
“Fuck Pritchett,” Dartley said. “Pritchett works for me. He’ll just have to find someone new after you’re gone.”
Omar’s lips were trembling. “Don’t hit me! Mustafa Bakkush works somewhere out in the desert, no one knows where or what he is doing. I have heard he is working on a nerve gas.”
“That’s not his technical background.”
Omar gestured. “I do not understand these things well, but I think you are right. He is more splitting the atom, right? Who knows? What I can tell you is this, and no more: He comes into Cairo two days a week and meets with scientists and engineers from here and Alexandria. They all gather at the Citadel. I stay away because it would be dangerous to be seen lurking there. I am too shaky in my present position already. But I do more than this for you. Yes, I think I can.” He waited, looking at Dartley expectantly.
Dartley took out a wad of American bills, peeled off three twenties, and handed them to Omar.
“I think this is worth more,” Zekri said politely, unable to keep his eyes off the wad of paper in Dartley’s hand.
Dartley peeled off two more twenties and handed them to him.
“An engineer who works at a government plant down in the Delta has attended some of these meetings. He helps me with things. But he will want much money. Here? At this place? Tomorrow? I will bring him. His English is bad. At this time? But remember you must pay for everything he tells you.”
Dartley nodded and looked after him as he waddled off into the evening along the dusty street, nervously glancing back over one shoulder from time to time.
The block was smeared with glistening blood and three right hands, severed at the wrist, lay on the cobblestones at its base. Dr. Mustafa Bakkush had not seen Islamic justice in action before. He had wondered why he had been seated on a wooden bench in this courtyard inside the Citadel instead of going to one of his scientific meetings. No one had said anything to him. The military officers just pointed. And he had done what he was told. As usual. He sat in the shade on one of the benches. Two of the benches were filled with fierce looking, righteous mullahs. Their fawning attendants stood along the rear wall. Charges were read against three men. They were accused of theft. Bakkush recognized none of them. They were riffraff from the bazaars. What had this to do with him? Why was he forced to sit here?
The cutting off of the first man’s hand had been the worst. A brutal looking, overweight man had chopped it off on the block with a ceremonial ax. The hand had dropped to the cobblestones. A doctor and two nurses had rushed to staunch the bleeding from the man’s stump.
Mustafa vomited on the ground at his feet. When he recovered, he looked around him in an embarrassed way. Some of the mullahs were looking at him. One gave him a small smile of contempt.
After those three, charges were read against three more men. These three were foreigners—two Palestinians and a Jordanian—and they had been condemned to death for smuggling a large quantity of heroin. Two soldiers forced the first man, his hands tied behind his back, to kneel at the block. The heavy brute hacked off his head with three blows of the ax. The soldiers carried the executed man’s body out of the courtyard, but they left his head behind, along with the three right hands and a few liters more of fresh blood. The head lay on its left ear, eyes and mouth open, a vacant look on the face.
Mustafa Bakkush could not say why, but somehow that first hand which had been chopped off had affected him more deeply than this decapitation. It must have been the initial shock. Of course, he had known this was going on since Mubarak had been deposed—he just hadn’t realized the barbarity it entailed.
The second man to be executed—like the first—seemed so groggy and disoriented by fear, he hardly resisted and was slaughtered without protest. The third man shouldered aside the two soldiers, walked to the block, said something to the executioner which made him scowl, knelt, stretched his neck across the block, and died without displaying shock or fear. The mullahs murmured angrily among themselves at this display of defiance.
While this man’s body was being removed from the courtyard, a movement in a grilled window some twenty feet up the courtyard wall caught Mustafa’s eye. The sun cast diamonds of light through the grill onto a man’s face observing them while remaining concealed. The eyes, nose and mouth were caught for an instant in a single diamond of sunlight—and Mustafa recognized the face of President Ahmed Hasan.
They had brought out another prisoner and charges were being read again. He too had been condemned to death. Mustafa wanted to blot everything out. Then he heard a name. He focused his eyes and looked. It was not possible! They couldn’t do this! With a horrible sinking feeling in his stomach and another surge of nausea, Mustafa Bakkush realized why he had been brought to this courtyard.
He was on his feet. Shouting. What was he saying? He was telling them they could not do this, that this man was a genius, the greatest electrical engineer the Arab world had produced, a credit to Egypt, there was a mistake, it could not be allowed… Mustafa realized he was walking across the courtyard to the man, standing between him and the executioner at the block. Mustafa knew it was no dream. He could feel the baleful stares of the mullahs on him. He did not care. He was rescuing his old friend. They had been students together, had achieved worldwide fame together in the sciences. Mustafa heard the charges and did not care. He would see that everything was all right.
No one stopped him when he led the condemned man, whose hands were bound behind his back, out of the courtyard and through a dark archway into an old building. Mustafa did not know where the passageway led. He felt the cool air of the interior on his skin. He was still shouting—but had no idea what he was saying.
He saw tears running down the cheeks of the electrical engineer.
Thirty minutes later, Mustafa Bakkush found himself, calm and fearful, bowing in respect before the reigning mullahs of the Light of Islam, the very ones before whom he had disgraced himself in the courtyard, first by vomiting in the presence of an Islamic legal edict and then by disturbing the proceeding by his irrational behavior. The mullahs sat along one side of a very long table—for one offbeat moment Mustafa was reminded of a King Farouk banquet—and he stood alone on the other side of the table. President Ahmed Hasan sat among the mullahs, not at their center or in any place of honor, simply among them. Yet it was he who spoke.
“Mustafa Bakkush, I have spoken on your behalf with these men who have devoted their lives to the honor and glory of Allah and to respect for the message of His Prophet. Islam is merciful. You have spent years in the degenerate world of the West and your values became corrupted. Now you are again in the Islamic fold, but it will take time for you to purify yourself. These great mullahs whom you see before you, men who tread in the footsteps of the Prophet, have decided to be patient with you. Bow your head in gratitude and humility.”
Mustafa bowed his head and kept it bowed until Ahmed Hasan, apparently satisfied, began speaking to him again.
“Word was brought to me, Mustafa, that you expect your scientific colleague can be persuaded to work under your direction.”
Mustafa had sent no such message, not having been able to communicate yet in private with the electrical engineer. His eyes met with those of Hasan and he saw the look of warning there.
“Yes, indeed, honorable President.”
“I am pleased to hear it. Up to this point, he has refused to cooperate in achieving the goals of our Islamic republic. We will all depend on you to steer him toward the true path of enlightenment.”
“I will,” Mustafa said. He suddenly realized that this was a continuation of the spectacle put on in the courtyard, and that it was being put on for the mullahs by the p
resident rather than for himself. In fact, Hasan was now making him part of his show.
This was confirmed by Hasan’s next line of talk.
“Some of the holy men present here doubt the value of Western technology along with its immoral ideas. Some see how we can further the aims of Islam by using the weapons developed by the West against itself. Others—and I number myself among them—go farther. We say that if Islam is to survive in this hostile world, we must arm ourselves against our enemies. Muhammad knew the power of the sword! Today we must not shrink from the power of the atom!”
The bearded faces of the mullahs passed comments among themselves. They showed no fear or respect for the president seated among them in his military uniform.
Mustafa met Ahmed Hasan’s eyes. Again there was that warning look.
Hasan spoke quietly and slowly. “Dr. Mustafa Bakkush, a humble and devout man, our fellow countryman, will now explain to us what is involved in Egypt making a bomb. He will remember that we are not scientists, yet he will explain the processes involved and how we may achieve them. I know that, like me, Dr. Bakkush will never forget that the Zionist entity has full nuclear capability. The Christian, Jewish and Hindu civilizations possess this capability. Communist powers also have it. Only the Islamic civilization is without it. You may say to me, Pakistan has the atom bomb and Pakistan is Islamic. I would say back to you that Pakistan is not Arabic! Pakistan is allowed to have the bomb because the Russians are in Afghanistan and because its enemy, India, has the bomb. Pakistan does not care for us! There is no Arab bomb! Now Dr. Bakkush will speak to you.”
They sat in silence for a time and looked at him. Mustafa did not know how to begin. Then he remembered a talk he had given science students at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. He didn’t know how to talk about Islamic or Arabic bombs, but he did know how to give a simplified technical explanation of the manufacture of atomic weapons.
“The radioactive element uranium occurs more than ninety-nine percent of the time as uranium 238, which is a relatively harmless form or isotope. Less than one percent occurs in a lighter, unstable isotope called uranium 235. It is called unstable because its atom can be fairly easily split by a beam of electrons, and this splitting causes the chain reaction that results in the nuclear explosion.”
Mustafa cleared his throat and went on. “It is very difficult to separate these isotopes from one another in naturally occurring uranium ore. The process is called ‘enriching’ the uranium, and a number of complex techniques have been developed by Western industrialized nations. Also, things are complicated by the designs and knowledge possessed by the makers of the bomb. A simple bomb might need about twenty kilograms of enriched uranium. This amount is known as the critical mass. The new designs used by the Americans today have a critical mass of less than eight kilograms. We would need less than twelve to develop a bomb here. That may not sound like much, but it is a great quantity when you consider the difficulties involved.”
Ahmed Hasan growled, “If the Zionists can do it, so can we.”
“Well, they probably didn’t use this method,” Mustafa said. “I’ll, come to what they did in a minute. However, the Pakistanis are believed to have used this method. A Pakistani scientist working for a firm in Holland is believed to have smuggled home the plans for a cascade of high-speed ultracentrifuges which work through a spinning action. They are available on the market today. So is uranium ore, and at a very reasonable price, too. That represents one way we could do it.”
Hasan snarled, “I want to hear what the Zionists did.”
“The Israelis simply bought a French reactor for generating electric power and contracted for them to supply fuel, just as we have done. To work such a reactor, fuel rods or a blanket of fairly harmless uranium 238 are bombarded with neutrons, which causes some of the uranium to turn into plutonium, an element that is not found in nature. This artificial substance is highly unstable and is ideal for bombs. This kind of bomb can have a critical mass, even for us, as low as five kilograms.”
Mustafa shifted about on his feet. “The problem with this method is the danger in handling the plutonium. It has to be extracted by chemical means from the spent reactor fuel, and elaborate precautions must be taken to protect the workers from irradiation. Even the smallest—”
“There is no problem!” Ahmed Hasan boomed. “There are a thousand martyrs for Islam who tomorrow will use their fingernails to pluck this plutonium from the spent fuel! They will sacrifice themselves and be rewarded by Allah!”
Mustafa stared at him speechlessly.
Hasan sneered. “Don’t worry, Dr. Bakkush. You will not be required to show your devotion in this way. Unless, of course, your work elsewhere becomes unsatisfactory. Yes, we will soon have our bomb! Get us that plutonium!”
“I’m afraid it’s not going to be that simple,” Mustafa said apologetically. “The bomb must be designed.”
Hasan glowered. “I am not a fool, Bakkush. I too know of events in the outside world, although you may think I am nothing but an ignorant Arab who has never left his homeland. I have heard that university students can make bombs. They say that revolutionary groups in Europe and America will soon make their own atomic bombs and hold cities like New York for ransom. If these people can have bombs, I want to know why can’t Egypt too?”
“We will have a bomb, honorable President,” Mustafa said placatingly. “But only after the work has been done. You yourself have spoken of exploitative Western journalists. Here is another point to back what you said. While students or terrorists might have an understanding of how a bomb works, and could find many calculations in technical journals, these things would not enable them to make a bomb—in spite of what Western TV and novels claim. For example, one of the very important things is the shape of the charge. There are literally scores of factors which must be exactly right or the bomb will not work, and no one except an experienced man in the field would know what to do without years of trial and error.” Mustafa smiled sardonically. “After all, that is why you brought me back to Egypt. You have many bright young men who know everything theoretically. Yet you needed a knowledgeable old-timer like me to put the nuts on the bolts.”
A look of cold fury spread across Ahmed Hasan’s features as the scientist stood up to him opposite the mullahs.
“I will speak with you later,” the president grated, frustrated that he could not have this insolent dog shot immediately because of his value to the nuclear program. “You may leave.”
Mustafa Bakkush left, looking pleased with himself and far more confident than when he had entered the room. He seemed oblivious of the president’s anger toward him.
“I do not like that man at all,” a mullah with a huge white beard announced.
There was general agreement to this.
“But you do understand what he said?” Hasan asked eagerly, forgetting his rage. “You understand how this bomb is now within our grasp?”
The white-bearded mullah answered, “I understand that we play with the Devil.”
Hasan was clever enough to keep his mouth shut at this point. He let the mullahs discuss the fine ethical and theological points among themselves, and watched anxiously for who would show themselves to be his supporters and opponents. When he saw that fully three-quarters backed him, he spoke in a humble voice.
“All of us here know that I am a mere figurehead, only a tool to achieve the will of the Light of Islam. You are the true rulers of Egypt and I live only to obey your commands. At one word from you, the mob would tear me from limb to limb. And yet a nation needs a figurehead. Within the privacy of these four walls, I ask you to tell me what to do. Shall I go ahead to achieve an Islamic bomb?”
More than three-quarters showed their hands in support, and Hasan took to bowing and thanking them profusely. He deliberately did not ask those against him to declare themselves. But this did not stop one thin-faced man with a glistening black, pointed beard and the sharp eyes of a desert warrior from
standing up and gesturing for quiet.
“Fear not, brothers. I do not intend to fight your majority on this. You know that I think Ahmed Hasan holds too much sway over you and that he is a dangerously deluded man.” The fierce looking mullah paused to stare boldly at the president, who avoided his eyes. “It is not that I and my supporters in this are less dedicated than you. Perhaps each one of us have different reasons for feeling as we do. But, as I promised, we will not spend time discussing our dissent. Yet we will ask something in return for not opposing you vigorously on this. A small thing. Something of benefit to you as much as to us.”
He looked about to make sure each man was listening. When he spoke again, it was with a different voice. No longer was his tone friendly and reasonable.
“We have detractors overseas, Egyptians who insult their homeland with false stories, who shame us before the world, who insult our Islamic values. These men are embittered by their material losses when the corrupt reign of the dog Mubarak was overthrown. I need not name these individuals for you, and others join them daily when they see it is safe to do so, that no retribution is visited upon the heads of these wrongdoers who are an insult in the eyes of Allah and His Prophet and a scourge to the worthy mullahs of our homeland.”
He pointed a long finger in Hasan’s face. “We want you to open a training camp without delay to train young men to go out in the world and silence these infidels.”
Hasan looked genuinely pleased and relieved that this was all that was being required of him. “Tell me what to do,” he shouted to the others. “Is this your wish?”
This proposal was even more popular than the one for the atom bomb.
After dutifully escorting the mullahs to their waiting limousines in another inner courtyard, Ahmed Hasan retired to a private room deep in the fortress. There he drank tea and smoked two pipes of hashish. He needed time to think. Ahmed was acutely aware that he was now dealing with types of men he had previously been unaccustomed to. His whole adult life having been spent in the army, he knew the military mind, and over the years—out of necessity—had become acquainted with the political mind and the business mind. However, military men, politicians and businessmen were simple and straightforward, babes in arms in comparison to mullahs and scientists. The religious mind and the scientific mind were ones he would have to familiarize himself with before he could get the better of them. Ahmed liked to divide men into compartmentalized types according to their calling in life. He noted each man’s behavioral eccentricities within his own group and remembered them. But to Ahmed, a man was first what his job proclaimed him to be—a soldier, a politician, etc.—before he was an individual. (Ahmed put all women into only two types: pretty ones and ugly ones.) Yet each man had a fearful peasant streak in him, no matter how high and mighty or intelligent and enlightened he had become. He had only to be trapped within his own nightmares and be pressured in exactly the right way, in exactly his weakest place, and he would howl in anguish like any backward member of the fellahin. Ahmed’s problem was that he was not quite sure how to go about bringing mullahs and scientists before him on their knees.
