Retribution

by Ian Barclay

  Hasan Shawa was pleased to be rid of Naim and Ali for a day. They had left it for him to clean up the apartment after them, which of course meant only removing all traces of alcohol and drug consumption so as not to provide ammunition to critics who might find their dedication to Islam weak. Hasan had no complaints about Naim and Ali. He had served with a lot worse.

  Son of a hilltop citrus grove farmer on the West Bank, Hasan might have been tending the family trees today if Jewish settlers nearby had not sunk so many deep wells for irrigation that they lowered the water table and made a desert of the hilltop. In the middle of the growing season the fruit and leaves on the trees shriveled and fell off. The only authority they could complain to was the Israeli army, and their attitude to Arab farmers was well known. An officer did drive by to inspect their grove of dying trees above the prospering Jewish farms. He recommended that the family sell out and move across the river to Jordan. In the end this was what they had to do.

  Hasan stayed in school and joined every anti-Zionist organization he could find to help ease his simmering rage. He did well at his studies and won a scholarship to Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. The tightly regulated life in the Soviet capital did not suit him, and his wild ways did not appeal to the Russians. He was expelled from the university after four months for making fun of Communist Party leaders at a vodka binge.

  Sent back to Jordan in disgrace, he reacted by joining the PLO and going to a training camp in Lebanon. Here he met Soviet instructors again, and this time he got on better with them. The training course was divided into three parts—leftist political orientatíon, weapons and field craft, then hijacking and hostage holding. He had no interest in the politics. He did well at tactics and map reading, and become skilled with weapons. The Kalashnikov AK-47, and its light ened modified AKM version, was the weapon of his choice. This Soviet-designed assault rifle was manufac tured in several communist countries and available on the arms market everywhere. Hasan also trained with a still lighter Czech version called the vz58, which had a fiberglass stock, and also the drawback of climbing during automatic bursts.

  As a promising marksman he learned to use the Soviet Dragunov sniper’s rifle, a very heavy weapon with a telescopic sight and a cheek-piece on the butt, which could nail a man at nine hundred meters.

  Hasan was also trained to use pistols the Soviet way. Marksmanship and target practice were regarded as a waste of time. If a target was any distance away, you sprayed him with automatic rifle or submachine gun fire. A pistol was only for close-in fighting and was to be used almost like a knife, for body or head shots at almost point-blank range. They were taught not how to stand, hold and aim a pistol, but how to get in close to the unsuspecting target before ever drawing the weapon.

  They were also trained to use Israeli weapons, particularly the Uzi. This came in handy when they wanted to make the Zionists look responsible for an incident, especially when they hit a fellow-Arab for something. Also the Russians became embarrassed by the constant use of communist-bloc arms and wanted to see Western weapons used once in a while.

  From Lebanon Hasan went to Cuba for advanced training. He took part in numerous harassments of Israel from southern Lebanon. He fought the Israeli forces when they invaded Lebanon and was driven back by their onslaught. He was in Tripoli when the break within the PLO occurred, and his group aligned itself with Syria against Yasir Arafat.

  When Abu Jeddah was called on to form a fighting unit, he brought in Hasan, whom he had seen combat with and known for some time. According to custom the fighting unit became a splinter group with a lot of independence and its own name, the June 4—New Arab Social Front. That way its actions could not so easily be pinned to the parent organization. This was good news to Hasan. The only fighting he had seen in the past few years had been against Lebanese Arab Christians and fellow-Moslem Amal militiamen.

  Although his English and French were good, Hasan was surprised to be sent to Europe. He was more accustomed to living ín sandbagged bunkers than in hotels, and to eating out of cans with a combat knife than to using cutlery and a tablecloth. But he was used to obeying orders and he learned. Abu Jeddah spoke to him personally over the phone at the Syrian embassy in Rome when asking him to report to Naim Shabaan. Hasan was twenty-eight and a battle-hardened veteran, but he was not a leader and he knew it. Naim was four years younger than him and untried in combat. Yet, after his talk with Abu Jeddah and after meeting Naim, Hasan recognized him as leader willingly enough.

  CHAPTER

  4

  “Even if what they say about Maggie Thatcher is untrue,” Herbert Malleson argued, “even if she’s not about to announce her intention to sign the concordance, the terrorists will see this as a good time to strike. Their movements in Holland must be pretty restricted by now. If I was them, I’d have hightailed out of there long ago. My bet is that they have. They may already be in England. Certainly the customs and immigration people will be on the watch for them. But Great Britain is no longer an island fortress. It’s almost impossible to closely monitor movement in from the Common Market countries without causing all sorts of delays and raising a major political flap. That’s the last thing they want to do. They seem intent on keeping everything under wraps and making an early arrest of the key terrorists.”

  “The international airlines don’t share their optimism,” Charley Woodgate observed.

  “I don’t either,” Malleson answered. “I think Richard should leave tomorrow for London and waft there for developments.”

  Dartley nodded. “That makes sense. Even if they do hit again in Holland, I’ll be closer to them in London than here.”

  “They’ll strike in Britain,” Malleson said adamantly.

  “You leaving for someplace tomorrow?” Sylvia Marton asked Dartley.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You usually give me a call just about then.”

  “I’m heading for London,” Dartley admitted. Sylvia had long known what he did for a living. He had not been able to fool her. In order to bind her to silence, Dartley had included her as a driver on a few jobs. He later learned she was a crack shot. “It seems I’m becoming predictable.”

  “I find all men predictable,” Sylvia said, lighting a cigarette and taking a sip of champagne.

  Dartley knew she did not believe him when he said he no longer missed cigarettes and alcohol. Sylvia liked to search a man for his weak points. She would empty both the cigarette pack and the bottle in an amused taunt of his health regimen.

  He replied, “All you’re really saying is that we all have a similar reaction to you—most of us, anyway.”

  “How boring.”

  “You didn’t seem so bored when you sent me that postcard from Rio while you were there with that banker.”

  “That was supposed to make you jealous,” she said.

  Dartley and she both realized that if they ever tried living together, they would be at each other’s throats before long. They saw one other continually for years now, but always irregularly. Dartley was alarmed when he realized he had developed a pattern in seeing her. Try as he might to break them, patterns and habits kept being re-formed in his daily activities. He was always the last one to notice them. This was why, on his operations, Dartley followed guerrilla training procedures of deliberately making random changes in even the simplest activities. Some little predictable habit of his that he may have missed, his enemy wouldn’t.

  Sylvia was a blue-eyed blonde, a naturalized American citizen from Yugoslavia. She had been in a number of second-rate films in her early twenties. She’d won no Oscars or rave reviews, but the movies had been kind to her bank account even if the critics hadn’t been kind to her. She still got occasional small roles. She didn’t need them except as an ego boost, because Sylvia was an old-fashioned girl, the kind who believes that a man should hold the door open for her and pay the bill.

  Richard Dartley was an exception to this rule. She had cooked steaks for them in her Washin
gton apartment, saying that she supposed she should be grateful he had not become a vegetarian.

  “Or a celibate,” Dartley added.

  She smiled.

  After dinner she slipped out of her caftan and strode naked on high heels into her bedroom. Dartley followed her in and found her standing before a full-length mirror, brushing her blonde hair over her shoulders. The large, proud globes of her breasts were reflected in the mirror. His eyes roved over her broad shoulders, down her back to where it narrowed sharply to her waist, the cleft at the base of her spine, the smooth curves of her ass. He felt his cock stiffen.

  He kicked off his shoes and discarded his clothes. Walking up behind her, he placed his hands on her shoulders and looked at her breasts in the mirror. Her nipples were erect and the areolae were dark and distended. His hands slid from her shoulders and stroked her breasts.

  He pressed his body into her back, letting her feel his stiff dick. She turned to face him and they tightly embraced.

  He led her across the room and pushed her down on the bed. She lay back with her eyes shut, waiting submissively for him to take his pleasure with her.

  Naim had them do a dry run the previous day and everything had worked perfectly, with the timing just right. Hasan had the most objections, so Naim had him take the main part, which Naim himself would take the following day. Hasan’s objections were reasonable.

  “They told us that Oxford University exists for its students, not tourists,” Hasan said. “Christ Church College was getting so crowded, they have to limit tourists to small groups between 9:30 to noon and 2:00 to 4:30. You even have to pay an entrance fee. It’s crazy to go into any restricted environment like that when the streets are open and unwatched.”

  “I agree,” Naim said. “It’ll be the last place they will expect terrorists to strike. I’m sure all three of us would be taken in for questioning if we set foot within a mile of London Airport. But they won’t be watching for us at Christ Church.”

  Hasan gesticulated with his hands. “Why Christ Church? Why not Westminster Abbey?”

  “Because that would be taken as an attack on religion,” Naim explained. “Ilt’s Christ Church College we’re targeting. Why that one? Two reasons. It is old and beautiful and draws tourists. The second reason is more important. Of all the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, Christ Church supplies by far the greatest number of members of Parliament. In a single act we will show them that nothing they revere is safe from us.”

  Hasan smiled slowly. “It is worth the risk,” he said.

  Six months before Naim had spent three days visiting Oxford. He had spent some time then at Christ Church College and knew exactly where he would go. On the second day Hasan and Ali drove to Oxford separately along the M40 and A40. Naim took an express train from Paddington Station, a journey of about an hour which he hoped to complete unnoticed. But he had no such luck. A moderately insane elderly woman with dried flowers in her straw hat sat next to him, informed him that he was a kind-looking young man and proceeded to tell him what was on her mind. Pigeons were robbing all the seeds from her bird feeder, bullying away the little songbirds.

  Naim nodded sympathetically to her and looked around desperately for another empty seat. There wasn’t one.

  She told him her bird feeder was on top of an antique stone column around which ivy grew. She claimed it had been the centerpiece of her garden— before the pigeons discovered it. She had clapped her hands and shouted at them. This worked at first and then not at all. In fact one afternoon one of the pigeons landed on her shoulder, obviously expecting to be fed. Quite clearly she needed to take action urgently then. Didn’t the kind-looking man agree?

  Naim nodded and avoided the eye of a man smirking at his predicament. Normally Naim would not have minded at all listening to her patter. But today he wanted to pass unnoticed. He did not utter a word in case his Arabic-accented English might draw further attention to him.

  She said she had a brilliant idea. She would take the bird feeder off the stone column and hang it from a bamboo pole stuck in the ground. The ligfit weight of the small birds would hardly affect it, but heavy pigeons trying to land on the feeder would cause the bamboo and feeder to whip back and forth and dislodge the pigeons.

  Naim smiled brightly to demonstrate his appreciation of this maneuver.

  This was the kind of occurrence he had been warned about in training. Once an operation was under way in earnest, simple everyday things which can be depended upon not to change suddenly show remarkable ability to do so. The Americans had a phrase for it: anything that can happen will. For a century the English were famous for not talking to strangers on trains. Here was the exception to prove that rule. He somehow managed to mumble and smile his way until the train neared Oxford, when he fled from his seat. Damn, some of those passengers would remember the foreigner pestered by the crazy bird lady.

  He walked down the hill from the station and caught a red bus to Carfax, a major Oxford intersection. Ali met him on St. Aldate’s Street and handed him a briefcase out the car window.

  “Join Hasan,” Naim said unnecessarily to Ali, who drove away. Yesterday they had all come to Oxford together in one car.

  Tom Tower stood nearby over the main gate of Christ Church College. Hasan had carried an empty briefcase yesterday and had not been asked to check it or reveal its contents. But why should he? They were in the heart of peaceful England.

  “If you care to wait, sir,” one of the men at the gate said to him after he had paid admission, “I will be giving a short talk on some points of interest to these Japanese and American gentlemen following you.”

  Naim looked back and saw a dozen or so men who might be academics or medical doctors on a convention outing. “How long will I have to wait?”

  “No more than three or four minutes, sir.”

  “Thank you, I will.”

  He lingered a little, then wandered casually into Tom Quad. Having opened the briefcase, he set the digital timer for six minutes and spent an anxious moment as he snapped the current on. A misconnection or fault in the circuit could have set the bomb off. Hooking the device to its live power source was always the most dangerous point in handling delayed-action mechanisms. Naim set down the briefcase against the base of the building’s ancient stone wall. Then he walked away quickly toward the east side of the quad. He turned right into Peckwater Quad and hurried on to the smallest of the college’s four quads, Canterbury. Outside the back gates of the college, Hasan and Ali waited in their cars. He joined Hasan and Ali followed them, ready to run interference if they were chased.

  “Christ Church was Henry the Eighth’s favorite Oxford college,” the guide announced in a slightly bored way to the law professors from Japan and the United States. They were attending some event at one of the other colleges and came around here in batches of two nations at a time. Already today they’d had the Italians and Nigerians. He ushered them into Tom Quad, looked for a moment for the other visitor, decided he hadn’t waited, and promptly forgot him. A fountain played on the green lawn of the quad. “Garden parties are held here. But, gentlemen, please don’t walk on the grass. That privilege is reserved for members of the college,” by which he meant the teaching staff.

  The visitors looked suitably impressed.

  The guide pointed upward. “Tom Tower, over the main gate, was begun by Cardinal Wolsey, who founded Christ Church in 1525, and finished in the next century by Sir Christopher Wren. Its seven-ton bell, known as Great Tom, tolls a hundred and one times at 9:05 P.M. This was curfew time for the hundred and one original students, and the custom has been kept on. No doubt it tolls at five minutes past the hour to accommodate the objection of a student who pointed out that Oxford is five minutes west of the Greenwich meridian, east of London.”

  The law professors politely tittered at this distinction.

  Inside the briefcase the last few seconds of the six minutes set on the digital timer’s liquid crystal display flicked backward to four z
eros. The automatic switches connected the battery to the fuse circuits. The fuse ignited the plastic explosive. The charge blew the three-inch steel nails packed tightly around it through the disintegrating briefcase leather. The stone wall behind the charge directed its force into the quad.

  The nails passed through the bodies of the nearest law professors without stopping.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Dartley first became aware of the Oxford attack that afternoon on a London street. The early editions of the evening papers carried it in banner headlines, and he saw more about it on the television news. No mention of the Ostend Concordance or that the attackers might be Arab. A Northern Ireland clergyman on a visit to Oxford was certain this was the work of the Provisional IRA.

  Six of the thirteen law professors had died within an hour of the explosion, cut to pieces by steel nails. Four others and their guide were badly injured, with two not expected to survive. The chief constable said that he had nothing further to say to the press at this, stage, but that the police had received important information and that arrests were imminent.

  Having taken an early train to Oxford next morning, Dartley avoided the main gate of Christ Church and spent some hours prowling student hangouts and bookstores close to that college. It was as if an unwritten pact had been made among the students not to speak of the incident and return to normal life immediately. Dartley reflected that on an American campus students would be compering to tell TV cameras how traumatized their lives were by the bombing. Here it was cold politeness and sealed lips.

  In a little lunch place he spotted a student who was almost certainly an Arab. The young man was alone, sitting at a small table at which there was one other chair.