Reprisal

by Ian Barclay

  She was with him again, demanding money. Dartley couldn’t follow her backstreet Arabic, but she made it very clear that if her two friends got twenty pounds each for not having to move their asses, she expected considerably more if he hoped that she would move hers.

  “May Allah chop off the hands of all those who help the evil foreigners!” Ahmed Hasan shouted in a rage.

  Everyone grew quiet in the room at the presidential palace.

  “The mullahs are right—a tide of evil sweeps through our country!” Hasan shouted, beginning to stride up and down now, his hands clasped behind his back, wearing a khaki military uniform with all his decorations. “The bringers of this scourge upon Egypt must be rooted out. Painfully! They must atone for what they have done with their blood!”

  The people in the room tried not to move and listened urgently for a clue about who or what the president was condemning.

  Hasan saw no sign of their puzzlement. He saw the evil right before his face, everywhere he looked, weakening, corrupting, undermining… He went on shouting, and they listened. His eyes blazed and his pace quickened as he thought about his enemies, the ones who could not be permitted to exist a day longer in Egypt.

  When he ran out of steam, he sat beside a water pipe and lit the hashish in its bowl. He inhaled the tranquilizing smoke deeply and its sweet smell spread through the room.

  As yet no one had figured out what he had been ranting about. They gave him surreptitious looks now to see whether his mood would improve while he smoked the dope.

  Their glances irritated Ahmed Hasan. He cursed them silently for always watching him, for being weak and fearful, too timid to stand up to him. That was what he needed—someone he could talk to, have reasonable discussions with, use as a sounding board for his ideas instead of all these cringing toadies who timidly said whatever their tiny brains calculated he wanted to hear. Either they were like that or they were gun-waving maniacs who had trouble understanding anything longer than one-word commands. Here he was, a great Arab leader, perhaps the most important Arab of this century, surrounded by cringers and maniacs. Allah, grant him patience…

  Along with the cringers and maniacs came spies. Everywhere! These enemies of Islam insinuated themselves close to him and his government ministers, watched, listened to everything, then reported back to their foreign masters. These dogs should be skinned alive. He had already ordered the ears, nose and tongue cut from some of them, intending to set them loose on the streets as a warning to others. However, they all died on him before he could turn them out. A pity. He would try again, with medical surgeons next time.

  Meanwhile, an American devil was wandering the city streets. This monster had killed four loyal Egyptians on Zamalek Island and put out the eye of another. A second foreigner with him had killed two more government agents. Hasan had sent a strongly worded note of protest to the American Embassy, and they, of course, had denied all knowledge of this wrongdoing. So long as they went on sheltering Mubarak and other ministers of the overthrown government, they were his enemies. Those who were not his friends were his enemies. They sent spies. Everywhere… Would Reagan bomb him if he stormed the embassy? Yes. It was unfortunate, but that was the clear answer. If he broke off diplomatic relations with the Americans, they would almost certainly seize the Suez Canal with active European support. Better to live on with them as one would with a thorn in one’s flesh, yet ready always for a chance to pluck it out.

  But he did not have to live on with the traitorous dogs his men had captured in the act of betraying the Islamic revolution. And he would not!

  Hasan jumped to his feet and began pacing again. The murmur of conversation in the room which had gradually risen now died away again. They kept an eye on Ahmed Hasan.

  The president was beyond being annoyed by such trivialities at this point. He had decided to take action! He snapped his fingers and pointed to a door. At this signal, his armed bodyguards in their battle fatigues peeled off walls, grew out of corners, clustered around him, and suddenly moved with him like a small swarm of angry hornets out of the room.

  A military officer in the room phoned the Citadel. “He’s on his way.” He smiled when he heard the groan from the other end of the line. He replaced the receiver and joined a group in the room, which now was filled with conversation and laughter.

  Ahmed Hasan jumped from one of the Range Rovers that came to a stop in an interior courtyard of the Citadel. He and his bodyguards stormed through a stone archway into one of the buildings. Some plumbers working on a pipe in the hallway squeezed against the wall to let them by.

  Hasan stopped and grabbed a ten-pound monkey wrench from the plumbers’ tool box.

  “Where are the traitors?” he shouted at the desk sergeant. “Take me to the traitors!”

  The frightened sergeant dithered for a moment, not daring to ask the president who he meant. He grabbed a bunch of keys and left his desk, with the president and his guards right behind him. The sergeant unlocked a steel door and pointed at four men behind the bars of the first cell they came to. The four were wan and emaciated, their muscles withered from malnutrition and extended lack of activity, their skull and arm bones revealing the skeleton beneath the skin.

  The president gestured toward the lock on the barred door. The sergeant fumbled, found the key, turned it in the lock, and pulled open the door.

  Hasan rushed in with the heavy wrench raised in his right hand.

  “Traitors! Hand servants of foreigners! Dogs! Spies!” the president shouted.

  He staved in the top of the head of a squatting prisoner with a single blow of the wrench.

  The three other prisoners jumped to their bare feet and scampered around the cell in their rags as the uniformed president chased them. The sergeant slammed shut the barred door.

  Hasan brought one man down with a wild blow that caught him on the back. Before the man could rise, Hasan beat him to death in a frenzy of blows while screaming about the Devil.

  The two surviving prisoners watched, cowering against a wall and whimpering for mercy.

  A female guard asked the sergeant, “What did these four prisoners do?”

  The sergeant looked at her for a moment to see if she was serious. He shrugged.

  Ahmed Hasan rushed at the two prisoners, sending them both to the floor with a few blows of the reddened wrench. He beat each of them in a series of dull thuds until their bruised and bleeding bodies stopped moving and they lay inert as sacks of wet clay at his feet.

  He threw the wrench across the cell and made for the door. The sergeant held it open for him. A female bodyguard handed him a large white handkerchief, which he used to wipe the blood from his hands and arms

  She pointed to blood spatters on his pants. “They’ve ruined your uniform.”

  “No,” Hasan declaimed. “Any loyal Egyptian should be proud to wear a traitor’s blood upon his clothes.”

  Chapter

  7

  Dr. Mustafa Bakkush did not dodge away from the prayer group for coffee anymore. He had not said a word about being waylaid by the American in the cafe, fearing that, sooner or later, Hasan would make him pay for his betrayal with his blood if he ever came to know of it. There was safety in numbers, and Mustafa now liked to bury himself in the midst of the group of engineers, scientists and other technicians that was ushered from the Citadel to the mosque by the mullahs. On one occasion, while the others were prostrating themselves on the mosque tiles, a mullah Mustafa had never seen before clasped him by the arm and led him away from the prayer area. He took him to a large room with a vaulted stone ceiling and decorative tile walls. The floor was covered with a magnificent thick carpet. There was no furniture. The mullah pointed to the carpet and Mustafa sat, tucking his stockinged feet beneath him. The mullah left without ever having spoken a word to him. Mustafa waited.

  Then two mullahs, whom Mustafa had seen before, entered the room and sat near him on the carpet. They all exchanged the polite pleasantries customary for
Arabs before a serious word was spoken. Mustafa had seen these two when he had explained nuclear technology to President Hasan and the mullahs at the Citadel. One had a huge white beard. He remembered this man’s striking appearance, although he had left the meeting before this mullah accused the president of playing with the Devil by depending on advanced Western technology.

  Mustafa remembered the second mullah as the hawk-faced desert warrior with a glistening black, pointed beard who had stared unblinkingly at him with dark, contemptuous eyes. Mustafa had also left the meeting before this mullah had forced the president to set up a terrorist training camp in exchange for his not opposing Hasan’s nuclear program.

  The desert warrior said, “What progress are you making on the bomb?”

  Mustafa tried to be vague. “All goes well, in sha ‘allah.”

  “You blaspheme by suggesting that Allah might wish us to mire ourselves in the Devil’s plan to destroy the world.”

  “That was not my intention,” Mustafa said firmly, determined to avoid matters of religion with these two fanatics.

  “We are opposed to Ahmed Hasan’s plan for an Egyptian atom bomb and we make no secret of our opposition,” the one with the white beard said, bringing them back to the matter at hand. “You will therefore realize that we do not view your role in all this very kindly.”

  Mustafa said nothing.

  The white beard continued, “You might have excused yourself by saying you are not here of your own free will. We have heard about how your family… arrived at Cairo airport before you made your decision to come. We sympathize with your position.”

  The desert warrior mellowed a little and added his piece. “We have not brought you here to abuse you.”

  Mustafa waited in silence.

  The white beard picked up the conversation again. “There are zealots who wish to harm you because they feel you alone can achieve this bomb for Hasan.”

  Mustafa suddenly got the uncomfortable feeling that the desert warrior was the main zealot that the white beard was talking about. Maybe they were doing what the Americans called a “good cop-bad cop” routine on him. Mustafa was a devoted reader of detective novels. He kept his mouth shut.

  “I myself have pointed out to them that personal harm to you would merely delay the project, not halt it,” the white beard said.

  “Killing me wouldn’t even delay it,” Mustafa explained quickly. “All the basic processes are already set up and some are even in production. The president would have adequate time to find a replacement for me for the final steps in arming the weapon.” Mustafa was making it sound easier for Hasan than it really would be, hoping this was being taken in by the desert warrior. “I am not a vulnerable point in the chain of production.”

  The pointed black beard glistened and the hawk’s eyes bored into him. “What then is the vulnerable point?”

  “There are more than one,” Mustafa said, turning on them suddenly with the defiance they had seen him display to the president. “The vulnerable points vary with your ability and willingness to act. For the French they are different from those for the Americans.”

  “We are mullahs,” the desert warrior said dryly.

  “Simple,” Mustafa said airily. “France supplies Egypt because of oil. Egypt does not have the oil resources to pressure France. Who then is Egypt’s ally in pressuring France for an Islamic bomb? If you could persuade them to withhold their support, France would laugh at Hasan’s demands.”

  Though no names were mentioned, all understood that Mustafa was talking about Iran. The cheap oil on long-term contracts being given to France was all from Iran. It was commonly rumored at high levels in the Citadel that Hasan had promised Iran two bombs for use on Israel, but refused them one for Iraq. It was even rumored that King Hussein of Jordan was deeply concerned, since his country was next to Israel and could expect to be ravished by nuclear fallout. Hasan had questioned Mustafa closely on fallout patterns under conditions of a moderate east wind.

  Mustafa had taken the bull by the horns by saying that any bomb dropped on Israel in an east wind would deposit fallout on Egypt’s second largest city of Alexandria. A bomb dropped in a west wind would affect Jordan’s capital, Amman. In a south wind, the coastal cities of Lebanon and Syria would be affected, and in a north wind it would be the Egyptian and Saudi coasts of the Gulf of Aqaba and probably the Red Sea coasts also. Mustafa had added that, besides this, wind patterns and directions were unpredictable and changed with altitude, so that fallout could in reality occur in any direction.

  This slowed Ahmed Hasan until someone told him about small bombs with low radioactive yields. Use four small ones instead of one big one. This approach had the added advantage, from Hasan’s point of view, that even if they brought down one plane, there were still three more on the way. Mustafa was now working on small bombs, which greatly increased the technical problems and delayed the delivery schedule.

  Mustafa had now begun to hope that a change might occur in Hasan’s unstable regime before he would be called upon to complete a workable nuclear weapon. All he had to do was keep quiet and pretend that all was going well—and hope that Ahmed would destroy himself before he gained the capacity to destroy millions of others. But Mustafa had no intention of explaining this to these two mullahs, who would probably misunderstand what he was saying and wildly misquote him, with dire consequences for Mustafa himself.

  When Mustafa hinted to the two mullahs that if they wanted to stop Hasan their best way was to stop Iran, they were stung by his words. Iran was controlled by mullahs. What could be easier for them?

  The white beard answered him. “The Persians are not Arabs. They share Islam with us and so we are bound together under Allah. Remember too that they are Shiites and we are Sunnis. These Persians consider Ahmed Hasan’s plans to be in their interest. What do they care if the Mediterranean is devastated by nuclear weapons? Not at all.”

  Mustafa decided to take a chance on these two mullahs. He had to, since the desert warrior was likely to order him killed on the offchance that it might delay the program in spite of what Mustafa claimed.

  “A working nuclear device is still in the future,” he said with insolent confidence to the two mullahs. “I will warn you well in advance of the time these bombs become a physical reality. Until that time, all you hear is merely empty words. In sha ‘allah“—this time he very deliberately repeated the phrase that meant God willing—“that time will never come while we three are here to prevent it.”

  The mullahs nodded, smiled, touched his arm and left the room in that slow way they had of moving, which showed their dignity and power.

  Fuck them all, Mustafa thought, I wish I were back with my wife and kids in the cold English rain.

  Jacques Laforque left his crumpled trenchcoat in his room at the Hotel des Roses on Talaat Harb Street—he would not be needing it in the mild Cairo autumn. The hotel was modest but pleasant. He always stayed there on his frequent trips to the city, which he supposed made things a little easier for his opposite numbers in Egyptian intelligence. They didn’t seem to care and had ignored him for years. Never flattering for an intelligence operative, yet a fact of life for most. You got classified as middle level, and no one these days could afford continued surveillance on all the attachés, visiting businessmen and tourists who fitted into this category. It was because of the French government’s tight purse strings that he stayed at the Hotel des Roses instead of the Nile Hilton, the Marriot Hotel or one of the other expensive places.

  Paul Savage, the man Richard Dartley had sent instead of himself, had cabled his coded message to Paris: Hasan was building a bomb; Savage would now kill Hasan. Everything was going as agreed. Which was enough to make Laforque’s Paris superiors nervous. They didn’t like this lone operator out in the field with no strings attached for them to pull. No, no, they had no change of mind, they were pleased with how things were going. But… if Laforque would not mind… they would feel reassured if he would go to Cairo hi
mself just to make sure everything was in place. Yes, they realized that Laforque had no prearranged way to contact this American Paul Savage—which they regarded as a serious weakness in the plan, as Laforque conceded—but even though Laforque did not know how to find him, they felt sure that a man with Laforque’s talent and resources would discover a way… How could he refuse?

  Laforque had a simple way to locate Savage all right. He would pay Omar Zekri to find him. Omar knew the name of every rat in the sewers.

  The Frenchman found Omar at one of his usual places, where he tried to be on time every day so that his numerous informants and contacts could trade with him on a regular basis, and besides all that there was his “ancient artifact” business aimed at the tourists. Omar was a constantly active man. There were rumors he had a Swiss bank account. Others said he spent everything in wild flings.

  “I am looking for an American,” Laforque told Omar. “His name is Paul Savage, or so he says.” He went on to describe Richard Dartley in detail. “Look for him around the nuclear technicians at the Citadel when they make their frequent trips in from the desert.” He passed a wad of Egyptian bills to Omar. “You’ll get the same amount again when you put me in touch with him. You know where to find me—at the Hotel des Roses.”

  Omar said, “The American calls himself Thomas Lewis here. I know him, but I can’t say where he is right now or even if he’s in the city. I’ll put out word.”

  Laforque nodded and went away, satisfied with himself for knowing who to see in a matter like this.

  Zekri was even more satisfied with himself. The Egyptian government wanted this American. So did Pritchett and the CIA. And along with Pritchett, a masked man who spoke Arabic with a Lebanese Christian accent. The Lebanese Christian spoke French. And now Laforque from government intelligence in Paris. Omar could not see anything that made sense there. Then there was Laforque’s remark about nuclear technicians around the Citadel, although he did not mention Dr. Mustafa Bakkush by name. Omar decided quickly not to waste time trying to unravel the puzzle. He’d sell what he could about each one to the others and try to keep them all scrambling after one another while they improved his cash flow situation. He phoned Awad and Zaid.