“I told you not to be late,” said the General, in that modulated Harrow School accent. “You could have got us all killed.” Which proved, in a sense, you can take the officer out of the British Army, but you can’t take the British Army out of the officer.
Shakira did not actually care what he said, so long as he was still breathing. She rushed across the floor and hurled herself into his arms, allowing her rifle to drop with a clatter. Over and over, she said, “Thank God…thank God.”
Meanwhile, Jacques Gamoudi, who was still positioned halfway up the wall, cleared his throat theatrically and suggested that they had all better get out of there very fast, before someone charged them with four murders.
He jumped down from the ledge and led the way out into the corridor and down the stone stairway. The place was deserted aside from two groups of tourists. Beirut and its environs had retained its dangerous reputation over the years, and that coastline was still not especially popular among visitors, who thought they might be kidnapped. God alone knew what the first group to go inside would think when they stumbled on the four French hit men lying dead on the second floor, covered in blood and surrounded by hand grenades and rifles. Ravi Rashood mentioned that he was not anticipating a unanimous vote of thanks from the local tourist board.
Rashood told the embassy driver to head straight for the airport. He then used his cell phone to call two of his aides in Damascus and asked them to drive over to Byblos to pick up the Range Rover. The extra key was in the house on Bab Touma Street. Then he called the Saudi pilot and told him to file an immediate flight plan to Marrakesh, refuel the King’s Boeing, and be ready to take off in a real hurry, about one hour from then.
They had traveled six fast miles south before the Hamas General found time to introduce Jacques Gamoudi to his wife. Of course, as a red-blooded Frenchman, or at least a French citizen, Gamoudi had scarcely taken his eyes off the neck-snapping, walnut-eyed, gazelle-legged Palestinian goddess, and when he muttered, “Mon plaisir,” he really meant it.
But the situation here in Beirut was now menacing. The three of them sat in tense but companionable silence most of the way to the airport.
“Does anyone know why we’re going to Morocco?” asked Shakira finally.
“Well, it’s been a difficult decision,” said her husband. “Jacques is probably in more danger than we are, because he has the entire French Secret Service trying to kill him. You and I are in no more danger than usual. But Colonel Gamoudi has to get out of the Middle East, somewhere he can lie low for a few months, get his breath back. And his instinct is to fly back to Morocco, to his home up in the Atlas Mountains. No one’s likely to find him there. He and his father were both guides.”
“Are we going too?”
“Uh-huh. We’re staying with Jacques until I know he’s safe.”
“Is that why you wanted all this money — for airfares?”
“No. We’ve got a plane.”
“Will it hold three?”
“It’ll hold two hundred, plus crew.”
Shakira just shook her head. “Well, that’s okay then,” she said. “I was able to get a hundred thousand U.S. dollars from the bank.”
“Shakira,” said Rashood. “Aside from the lateness, I’d have to say you have excelled this morning, as a wife, a financier, and a marksman.”
“Thank you, General,” said Shakira, laughing. “It’s been my pleasure to work with you.”
It was amazing how thoroughly this Palestinian beauty had absorbed that British sense of irony from her husband. It’s not a natural way of thinking for any Arab, but Rashood thought it definitely suited her.
He leaned back in his seat, having cheated the Grim Reaper once more, and told her, “In the last twenty-four hours, I can say I owe my life to the former Shakira Sabah, and Jacques reckons he owes his to E. M. Forster.”
“Who’s Eeyem Forster?” demanded Shakira. “I never even heard that name Eeyem before?”
“He’s not Eeyem,” said Rashood carefully. “He’s E. M. Letters. The initials of his Christian names.”
Shakira thought about that for a moment, smiled, and said, “You mean like G. A. Nasser, or O. B. Laden?” knowing full well it sounded ridiculous. “Anyway, you still haven’t told me. Who is he?”
“He’s a very famous English novelist. My school insisted we read a couple of his books for A levels.”
“What books did he write?”
“Well, I suppose his best-known one is A Passage to India.”
“I’ve seen the movie,” cried Shakira in triumph. “Mrs. Moore!..Mrs. Moore!..Mrs. Moore!”
“So you have,” replied her husband, chuckling gently. “Forster had a very sensitive touch with subjects like loyalty, treatment of those less fortunate, and, I suppose most of all, friendship.”
“Yes, but…” said Shakira, employing her most reliable form of questioning, when she was starting to dig deeply into a subject. “How did he save Jacques’s life? Does he live in Saudi Arabia?”
“No, he’s been dead for forty years,” said Rashood. “But his words inspired a colleague of Jacques’s to treat their friendship more seriously than he treated a government order.”
“Was he ordered to kill you, Jacques?”
“Yes, Shakira. Yes, he was.”
“And he didn’t because he remembered the words of Eeyem?”
“Yes, that’s what he said,” replied Gamoudi.
“Hmm,” said Shakira. “You too have read his books?”
“No, I have never read them. But I think I will now.”
“Then I think you’d better get started,” said Shakira gravely.
“This Eeyem, he’s a very influential man.”
By this time they were within a couple of miles of Beirut International Airport. The traffic was terrible, and General Rashood again called the pilot on his cell phone and told him to be ready.
The embassy driver turned in through the cargo area and made straight for the runway where private aircraft were parked. The car pulled right up to the waiting Saudi Boeing 737, and the three of them rushed up the stairway.
The flight attendants, who had been hanging around all night, not disembarking, greeted them cheerfully. “Marrakesh, nonstop?” one of them said.
“If you would,” replied General Rashood.
“It’s almost twenty-three hundred miles,” the flight attendant replied. “And that’ll take us almost five hours. But we pick up three hours on the time difference. We should be there around five-thirty in the evening.”
By now the aircraft was rolling, thundering down the runway. The flight attendant, a young Arabian would-be pilot, hastily sat down and clipped on a safety belt, which was not a complication since there were close to 200 spare seats.
The Boeing screamed up into the blue skies above the eastern Mediterranean and set a westerly course. And as it did so, the CIA agent in the airport, the one who had arrived too late in the small hours of the morning, reached for his cell phone and hit the buttons to Beirut flight control.
He spoke to his airport contact. Twenty seconds later he knew the Saudi King’s aircraft was heading to Marrakesh, with three passengers who had arrived in a Saudi embassy car.
There was one difference between the two latest departures of the Boeing. In King Khalid Airport, Riyadh, the captain had not been obliged to file a flight plan. Here in Beirut, he was. And that put the Americans ahead of the game, because the six French agents in Lebanon were temporarily stymied. Four of them were dead inside the Crusaders’ Castle. The other two were still parked outside the Saudi embassy.
The U.S. field agent dialed Langley direct, and reported that the King’s Boeing had just taken off, heading directly for Marrakesh, no stops. Langley moved swiftly. They immediately contacted Lt. Commander Ramshawe and asked him for a degree of certainty on his report that Col. Jack Gamoudi had been born in the tiny village of Asni.
Lt. Commander Ramshawe, who had spent days searching through computerized
French military data, had managed to file away a copy of Jacques Gamoudi’s birth certificate, courtesy of Andy Campese in Toulouse and a Foreign Legion filing clerk in Aubagne, who had reacted favorably to Campese’s five-hundred-dollar bribe.
Ramshawe pulled up the photocopy of Colonel Gamoudi’s birth certificate and read off: “Born Asni, Morocco, June twelve, 1964…Father Abdul Gamoudi, mountain guide…”
“Beautiful,” said the voice from Langley.
“You guys got a lead?” asked the Lt. Commander.
“Sure have. The Colonel’s right now in a Boeing 737 owned by the King of Saudi Arabia, and he’s heading for Marrakesh, non-stop.”
“My boss will want to alert the Navy about that, but…wait just a minute. I have some extra data on Asni that may help.”
Jimmy Ramshawe’s fingers hit the computer keyboard like shafts of light, until Jacques Gamoudi’s early military record came up: “He worked as a mountain guide with his father in the High Atlas Range around his home village…He also worked in the local hotel and…this is interesting…the owner of that hotel, a former Major in the French Parachute Regiment named Laforge, sponsored him in his application to join the Foreign Legion…”
“Hey, that’s great, Lt. Commander.”
“Guess you guys think Jacques Gamoudi’s going home, right?”
“We’re thinking if the French Secret Service are trying to kill him, the Atlas Mountains are not a bad place to take cover. Christ, you’d never find him up there, not in those high peaks, where he knows the territory backward, and where he probably still has friends.”
“That’d be a tough one,” replied Ramshawe. “But we’re not trying to kill him, and we’ve got two damn good leads in Asni — his dad and his old boss at the hotel. If one of them’s still there, we might be in good shape.”
He rang off and headed immediately to see Admiral Morris, who listened to the latest twist in the saga of Le Chasseur. When Ramshawe was through, Admiral Morris pulled up Morocco on a computerized wall map, four feet wide.
“Let me just get my bearings, Jimmy,” he said. “Right, now here’s Marrakesh. Where the hell’s Asni? Is it close?”
“Yeah, right here, sir.”
“Ah, yes. Right astride the old mountain road between Marrakesh and Agadir, on the Atlantic coast…see this place here…where it says Toubkal? That’s one of the highest mountains in Africa. Guess that’s why Asni became a major mountaineering village. That’s where Jacques Gamoudi’s dad made his living.”
“So did Jacques, for a while.”
“Hell, those French killers have their work cut out. Can you imagine chasing a professional mountain guide through that range? You’d never find him.”
“You been there, sir?”
“I’ve been to Agadir. That’s how I remember Mount Toubkal. A bunch of our guys had shore leave for a week and they were going to climb it. It’s damned high and extremely steep — something like thirteen thousand feet.”
“You didn’t go yourself, sir?”
“Jimmy,” said George Morris. “I might look kinda stupid, but I’ve never been crazy.”
Ramshawe laughed. “So what do we tell the Big Man?”
“We tell him both the CIA and the NSA consider Le Chasseur is going home to the Atlas Mountains, to hide out from the French assassins. And we tell him it’s going to happen fast, and it looks like our best bet to grab him might be off the dock in Agadir.”
“We’re assuming he wants to be grabbed.”
“Jimmy, we’ve rescued his wife and family, his money’s safe in the U.S.A., and the French are trying to kill him. He’ll come, and he’ll do as we ask. He has no choice. Because if we don’t get him, the French will eventually take him out.”
“But how are we going to find him?” asked Ramshawe.
“Why don’t you call Admiral Morgan and see what he says?”
“Okay, sir. I’ll do that right away.”
He marched back down to his office and went through on the direct line to the White House at a particularly bad time. Admiral Morgan was wrestling with a statement from the United Nations condemning the action of the United States of America in sinking at least two, maybe three, and possibly four French ships. The statement was withering for the UN, which spent a certain amount of time each year expressing “dismay,” a small amount of time being “disappointed,” and considerable time finding things “incomprehensible.”
But, essentially, the UN did not “condemn.” As a word, it was too inflammatory, too likely to make a bad situation worse, and too difficult a word from which to retreat.
Today, however, the United Nations not only condemned, it issued a paralyzing anti-American statement that read, The probable actions of the U.S. Navy in the Strait of Hormuz represented bullying on a scale totally unacceptable to the rest of the world.
It added that the Security Council intended to summon the United States representatives to appear before the General Assembly, the main debating chamber of the UN. And there, every Member State, all 191 of them, would be invited to cast a vote in favor of the severest censure the UN had issued in a quarter of a century.
There was no state of war existing between France and the United States, the statement said. Therefore the action of the U.S. Navy must fall under the heading of, at best, a reckless and careless attack or, at worst, cold-blooded murder of innocent seamen.”
Either way the UN could not condone the actions of the U.S.A. The General Assembly would also be asked to decide whether substantial damages, possibly $1 billion, ought now to be paid in reparations to the French government.
When he read it, President Bedford shuddered at the enormity of the ramifications. Not many U.S. Presidents have been accused of “murder” by the UN. And Paul Bedford was not much enjoying his place in that particular spotlight.
Since Admiral Morgan had masterminded the entire exercise, he asked him to come into the Oval Office. And that’s exactly where they were when the phone rang with Lt. Commander Ramshawe on the line from Fort Meade.
Arnold Morgan just growled, “We got him yet?”
“No, sir. But we’re in better shape than we were yesterday. We know where he is, and we think we know where he’s going.” He outlined to the Admiral the developments of the day and the new significance of Morocco, and then posed the question he had asked Admiral Morris.
“If we want to pick him up in Agadir, sir, how the hell do we find him?”
“Jimmy,” rasped Morgan, “we got to get him a cell phone, one of those little bastards with a GPS system attached. That way we can hook him up with his wife onboard the Shiloh, and he can show us where he is. Do the guys at Langley think the French are in hot pursuit?”
“They don’t know whether Paris understands yet that Gamoudi is on his way to Marrakesh. But I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
“Right. Meanwhile you better get Langley to deliver one of those phones to Le Chasseur.”
“How and where, sir?”
“If the CIA can’t get a telephone to a guy who’s trying his damnedest to get into the U.S.A., they might as well close the fucking place down,” snapped Morgan, slamming down the phone.
President Bedford was extremely relieved to see that his main man had not lost his nerve in the face of a frontal assault by the UN. “This is very serious, Arnie, don’t you think?” he said.
“Serious!” growled Morgan. “You think we ought to be nervous about some half-assed, know-nothing Security Council that contains among its fifteen members the Philippines, Romania, Angola, Benin, and Algeria. Jesus! These guys are pressed to feed themselves and plant fucking soybeans, never mind have a hand in running the goddamn world.”
Even President Bedford, in the darkest moment of his presidency, was compelled to laugh.
“And I don’t want you to lose your nerve, Mr. President,” added Admiral Morgan. “Remember what we know has happened: the French, in partnership with some kind of a robed nutcase, have forced the world into it
s worst economical crisis since World War Two. With reckless disregard for any other nation’s plight, they cold-bloodedly smashed the Saudi oil industry with naval explosive, and then provided two Supreme Commanders to force the surrender of the Saudi armed forces and then assault the royal government in Riyadh.
“Now half the world’s without oil, and not everyone realizes, yet, that the French did it, for some sleazy financial deal with this Nasir character…that’s a guy dressed in a fucking bed sheet.
“And we have to get the industrial world out of this. And if that means sinking a handful of French ships, that’s the way it’s gotta be. They’re goddamn lucky we haven’t sunk ’em all.”
“But, Arnie, what about this United Nations censure?”
“Sir, this is a momentous chain of events. It’s something history will judge in the fullness of time. Ignore the short-term rantings of a few nitwits who only know about a tenth of the facts. Sit tight, don’t crack, and we’ll win this. Probably in the next week.”
“You mean if we can get this Colonel Gamoudi to testify at the General Assembly for us?”
“Absolutely. And he will, because his own land has turned against him, he’s been betrayed, and he only has one set of friends in the world — that’s us. We’ve rescued his family and his money, and we’ll save him. And when we’ve done it, he’ll sing — that curly-haired little French Moroccan will sing like Frank Sinatra.”
“You’ve only seen a picture of him in his Arab kit,” said the President. “How do you know he’s got curly hair?”
“North African, sir. All North Africans have curly hair. Christ, most of them live in the Sahara Desert. If they didn’t have thick, curly hair for protection, their heads would blow up.”
“Which of Darwin’s theories of evolution are you currently studying, Arnie?” asked Paul Bedford wryly.
“Right now I’m concentrating on the bit about the ever-evolving diabolically devious nature of the French,” retorted Morgan. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll just call Alan Dickson, we’ll have a couple of cups of coffee, and we’ll hear more. This is hotting up, and I’m darned sure we’re out in front.”
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