Reprisal

by Ian Barclay

  They too were greedy men, but theirs was an intellectual greed. Their lust for power was cloaked, often from themselves as well as others, by their much praised strivings for and benefits to mankind. Ahmed always found it easier to manipulate men who were aware of their own weaknesses. When a man wanted land or gold, that was what he got. But when a man’s greed was for respect and fame instead of land or gold, Ahmed found him a trickier adversary to subdue. And all Ahmed wanted was to subdue them—not degrade them into mindless yes-men who would be useless to him in their fields. He needed these mullahs and scientists. He felt he needed them as beasts of burden. To use them as that, he would first have to break them, domesticate them.

  Little Mustafa Bakkush had surprised him with his performance in the courtyard. The scientist had showed his own strange kind of courage—after having previously displayed his cowardice by vomiting at a simple decapitation! A strange man… Ahmed had looked down on the scene from a barred window high in a wall. It gave him pleasure to witness his enemies meet their end. The mullahs had condemned these felons, and Ahmed saw this as a new beginning in their relationship with him, in which they would function as a tribunal to pass judgment on those who offended him. Dr. Bakkush had nearly ruined everything with his unexpected outburst and rescue of the engineer. Ahmed had merely wanted to frighten the little scientist by having him see the execution of a colleague. It turned out that Bakkush too had an unpredictable side, like all these scientists. The electrical engineer had been the same! Ahmed had forgotten now what he had done to cause the man to rebel—there had been some incident, and the engineer refused to cooperate any further, regardless of penalty. Now Bakkush had saved this man’s life in an unexpectedly reckless move. Ahmed could not let the engineer think he could defy authority and be saved by Bakkush. He could not let Bakkush think so either. The engineer would obey or he would die, and Ahmed would teach him this. Even if he was a scientist and behaved in strange ways.

  Ahmed Hasan put aside his tea and hashish pipe, sent for an army officer and told him: “That electrical engineer will be important to us if we can get him to work for us again. I don’t want him injured or too badly treated. Is there a prisoner here he knew before they both came to the Citadel?”

  “Yes, sir. A chemist we caught spying for the Americans. They often walk together in the yard. The engineer also knows most of the other technical people under confinement here, sir.”

  “He does? Of course. Is this chemist important to our military effort?”

  “He’s a soil chemist, sir.”

  “Useless! I’ll use him. Bring them both here.”

  The officer left and Hasan wandered out of the room into the corridor. Two privates pushed a load of supplies on a two-tiered metal table with wheels.

  “Get rid of that stuff and bring the table in this room.” Hasan commanded. “Bring some rope too.”

  The two privates returned with the table and in a while the engineer Mustafa Bakkush had saved was brought in. Hasan ordered him bound in an upright chair close to the metal table. When the chemist arrived, Hasan had him stretched on his back on the table, his wrists and ankles bound to the four table legs.

  “Did you know that this man was a spy for the Americans?” Hasan asked the engineer, indicating the chemist spreadeagled on the table. “At least you did not do that.” Hasan took a length of nylon fishing line from one pocket. He said to the engineer, “You refused to work in your country’s nuclear program. I suppose that may be negotiable. But spying for a foreign power is unforgivable.” He beckoned to one of the two privates and turned to the man on his back on the table. He gripped him under the chin with one hand, his thumb on one side of the mouth, his fingers on the other, and by squeezing his grip, he forced the man’s mouth open. He said to the soldier, “Catch his tongue. It’s slippery. Use both hands, pull it right out of his mouth all the way it will come, hold on to it.”

  The man on the table, who had said nothing until this point, now began to gurgle, but could not enunciate any words because the soldier held his tongue extended from his mouth. Hasan wound the nylon line tightly around the roots of his tongue, knotted the line, and cut off the loose ends with a knife. Hasan nodded to the soldier to release the man’s tongue. This done, the man on the table began to talk desperately, but only one word in ten was understandable. Hasan covered each of the man’s nostrils carefully with a Band-Aid. His tongue swelled slowly and still fewer of his words made sense. Hasan placed another upright chair next to that of the engineer’s and sat beside him to watch the man on the table, whose tongue was now bluish purple and filling his entire open mouth.

  “I’ll go back to work,” the engineer suddenly offered. “Let him go.”

  “It took you long enough to make the offer,” Hasan observed.

  “Because it’s sincere. Let him go before it’s too late. I promise. I’ll work.”

  “We will consider your case,” Ahmed said judicially, turning the tables on him by treating the engineer’s bargaining as if it were a plea for mercy for himself.

  The president then lapsed into silence and stared stonily at the man choking on the table. As his tongue swelled more and almost completely blocked the airflow through his mouth, the man tried vainly to snort off the Band-Aids sealing his nostrils. He struggled wildly against his bonds, but they were secure. He quieted down and tried to wheeze air into his throat and lungs around his swollen tongue. His eyes were popping. His head turned to one side and he gave the engineer a desperate, pleading look.

  The engineer struggled against his own bonds in the upright chair. “What can I do to save him?” he begged Ahmed, next to him.

  The president ignored him.

  The man on the table choked, gasped, struggled, coughed and shuddered. The engineer looked away. Hasan gazed straight at the man until his last movement ceased and he lay staring from protruding eyes up at the ceiling, his large purple tongue bloated in his mouth.

  Hasan stood and cut loose the engineer. He spoke to the officer: “Have him wheel this punished traitor to all the cells where there are technicians and scientists. He may describe what has happened in any words he pleases.”

  The officer nodded to the privates, and they jostled the engineer toward the table. They followed him as he trundled the table out the doorway.

  Ahmed Hasan had a final word with the officer after they left. “Make sure he pushes the table himself and tells what happened to everyone. When he’s finished, give him a week in solitary confinement and then ask him if he wants to work. If he does, free him. If he doesn’t, shoot him.”

  The officer saluted and left.

  Chapter

  5

  “No one can work in a vacuum,” Richard Dartley muttered aloud to himself as he walked along the corridor of a modern office building in Cairo’s New City. He had told Omar Zekri that Pritchett at the American Embassy worked for him, which should take a rise out of the CIA man. Dartley did not worry about being harassed by the CIA in Cairo—they had more than enough on their hands already, from what he had heard, in trying to deal with Ahmed Hasan’s administration. He didn’t expect to learn anything more from Zekri himself or anyone he produced as an “informant,” now that Zekir had time to consult and organize. Yet, for better or worse, the Egyptian and the embassy CIA man were his only contacts in Egypt—his only escape from the vacuum—not counting the man he was on his way to see in the office building. He found a frosted glass door with a legend, beneath Arabic script, in English: NILE VALLEY ENTERPRISES.

  There was no one at the receptionist’s desk inside the office. Dartley caught sight of a man through an open doorway. He was sitting at a desk, bent down in intense concentration over something in his hands. Dartley stepped quietly in and looked. The man was fixing a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, snapped across the bridge. When he heard Dartley, he picked up one half of the spectacles and held the lens over one eye like a monocle.

  “Who are you?” he asked in English. He was dark-skinned
, chubby, not at all apprehensive.

  “Mr. Yahya Waheed?”

  The chubby Egyptian scrutinized him through the lens and nodded.

  “Herbert Malleson in Washington, D.C., told you I would be coming.”

  Waheed smiled and waved to a chair. “Yes, he did. Make yourself comfortable and I will be with you in a minute.” He spoke English with a noticeable American accent, but said nothing more as he went back to fixing his spectacles with a small tube of super glue.

  Dartley watched him work in the manner of a very nearsighted person, with the broken rims and tube of glue almost next to his eyes. Waheed shook his right hand. He shook it again, then tried to separate his second and third fingers.

  “Bonded,” he said. He picked up the tube and read, “‘Warning: Bonds skin instantly. Contains cyanoacrylate ester. Avoid contact with skin and eyes. If eye or mouth contact occurs, hold eyelid or mouth open and flush with water only and GET MEDICAL ATTENTION. If finger bonding occurs, apply solvent.’” He put the glue down thoughtfully and tried to separate his fingers again, without success. “I don’t have any solvent.”

  Dartley fixed the spectacle frames with the glue. Waheed put them on and walked agitatedly around the office, looking at his bonded fingers. Dartley observed him. If it had been anyone but Malleson who had put him onto this arms dealer, he would have left there and then and taken his chances on a street purchase. But Malleson had never steered him wrong. Yet… Dartley put a lot of importance on the source of his weapons. A dependable source was essential to the success of a mission, and at the same time it represented one of its greatest security risks. It was often through the arms dealer that work leaked about an upcoming operation.

  Dartley never carried weapons across a border, seeing it as a foolish risk. He liked to enter a country in a business suit or dressed as a tourist, and travel by scheduled airline or whatever would not attract attention.

  There was no way around the vulnerability of a weapons pickup, and when he had the weapons, he became open to all sorts of charges if he were caught in possession of them.

  Availability of the latest and best guns, even in relatively isolated places, presented no problem. Anywhere in the free world, if you had the cash to buy the best, someone found them for you.

  Yahya Waheed didn’t look the wheeler-dealer sort that Dartley expected a gun merchant to be. What worried Dartley was that he looked incompetent—was he to trust a harmless fuck who couldn’t even fix his own spectacles to do a weapons deal with him in a country where the government claimed all Americans were agents of the Devil? Dartley couldn’t afford to have anything go wrong for him in a place like this. Certainly not on the level of buying hardware from a jerk…

  “Did you get everything Malleson asked you to get?” Dartley inquired.

  “Yes, everything. We’ll go down now to my car and I will show you.”

  They took the elevator down to a garage in the basement of the office building. Waheed led him to a green Mercedes parked off in one corner away from the other vehicles. But they weren’t going anywhere. Waheed opened the trunk and gestured to two leather suitcases.

  Dartley liked this less and less. He unzipped one case—it wasn’t even locked—and lifted a light blanket that served as packing for a field-stripped Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun.

  “I want to assemble it,” Dartley said. He looked around. The garage was deserted. “All right here?”

  Waheed nodded in a relaxed way and put a cigarette in his mouth.

  Dartley put the gun together. It was new and in perfect condition. So far so good. This weapon was what he would depend on if he was going to take out Hasan. This was a Model SD, the silenced version of the MP5. He had thought of an assault rifle, such as an M16, but decided on a submachine gun for its easier concealment and quick action.

  When people thought of submachine guns, they thought of the Uzi. The U.S. Secret Service used the Uzi—all the world saw the agent holding one on videotape when President Reagan was felled by a psycho’s bullet. The tough guys—good and bad—on TV dramas carried Uzis. But everyone in the know used the Heckler & Koch MP5; the Coast Guard, DEA, Special Forces, Rangers, SEALS, the FBI counterterrorist team… in the United States alone. And they had one good reason: The MP5 was the only submachine gun which fired from a closed bolt. This meant that when a shot was fired, the only part of the mechanism which moved was the hammer, and this, of course, greatly increased the gun’s accuracy.

  The gun’s method of operation was delayed blowback. The delay in the unlocking of the bolt after the firing of a shot was caused by rollers. This delay allowed the bullet to leave the barrel, and thus the gas pressure to drop, before the breach could open. The cartridge case acted as a piston during recoil in this roller lock system. The cartridge case pushed the bolt backward while being floated in the chamber by the powder gases. The system was therefore a combination of recoil activated and gas operated, but without a gas system to clean.

  The semirigid bolt was locked by two side-acting rollers that bore against notches in the receiver. When a shot was fired, the rollers pushed into the bolt head and exerted pressure on the firing pin extension. This extension became separated from the bolt head and was pushed back. The rollers left the receiver grooves and withdrew into the bolt. By then the bullet had exited from the barrel, causing the gas pressure to drop. Only the return spring was now holding the bolt in place and thus it was easily driven backward by the recoiling cartridge case. As the case ejected, the return spring forced the bolt forward again, stripped a new cartridge from the magazine, and pushed it into the chamber.

  Everything looked in good order to Dartley. He loaded some thirty-round detachable box magazines with 9 X 19 mm parabellum ammo. He hefted the weapon—it weighed a little less than six pounds, and felt nicely balanced, a little heavier toward the front.

  He replaced everything in the suitcase, ready to use, checked other items, then replaced the packing and zipped the suitcase. Dartley went through the second suitcase much more quickly. He took out a miniature spray can, filled it from a plastic bottle of Clorox and dropped it in his pocket.

  Next he took out what looked like a pen. Using only one hand, he flipped off the top to reveal a short, double-edged blade. The base of each side of the blade was serrated to cut through nylon line and plastic tape. This was the new Tekna T-6000 Micro-Knife, the blade of which was formed from a single billet’ of moly-vanadium stainless steel—it was tough metal and didn’t lose its edge being hacked around. He replaced the top of the pseudo pen and dropped that in a pocket too.

  “I’m not going to chance carrying anything else,” he said to Waheed, “in case I get taken in or searched.”

  “I have arranged a pickup for the bags,” the Egyptian said. “You have a hundred-dollar bill?”

  Dartley peeled a crisp one from his roll and handed it to him.

  Waheed tore it in half along a zigzag pattern. He gave one half back to Dartley and said, “That will be your hatcheck. That is what you say?”

  “Sure.”

  “I leave these suitcases in the Pensione Cornwall at this number on Adli Street in the New City. You give the desk clerk that half of the bill so he can put it with this half to make himself very happy. You will have your two suitcases. What could look more natural than an American leaving a hotel with two suitcases?”

  “Sure.” Dartley made to walk away across the garage to an exit door.

  Waheed called after him. “The Pensione Cornwall is on the seventh floor of an apartment building. Mostly the elevator is not working, I am sorry. But it keeps the place very private.”

  “Sure.”

  When Omar Zekri told Awad and Zaid about the American who claimed to be Pritchett’s boss and was looking for Dr. Mustafa Bakkush, they checked on him at Immigration, noted his phony “agricultural expert with the UN” status, thought nothing much about it and filed a routine report. Which got them hauled in on an emergency basis. Find this man. Take him alive
if possible. At all events, take him out of circulation even if the crudest means were necessary. But only as a last resort. Go. Do it. Now.

  Yes, sir.

  Like that.

  Zaid and Awad were used to such mistreatment from their bureaucratic superiors. They hardly bothered to wonder why this was such a big deal. They just drove out and hit on Zekri again, had him show them the exact place where he was to meet with the American along with the other informant he was supposed to bring. They didn’t have to tell Omar he was not to show up as arranged.

  They set things up calmly, paying no attention to the screams and demands of the pen pushers giving them orders, collected good men and allowed themselves plenty of time.

  The black van turned off the Sharia El Sheikh Marsafy on Zamalek Island in the Nile and continued down the dusty, tree-lined, residential street.