Fire Hawk

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘Kiev. He’s a major in the Ukrainian army. Claims to have information about some sophisticated weapon or other that’s been acquired by the Mafiya from his own military.’

  ‘Christ! But that’s exactly what—’

  ‘I know. It sounds highly relevant, but we haven’t been able to talk direct to the man yet. Defections are tricky diplomatically. That’s why we need to send someone from here to question him. He’s scared to death of going to his own security people because he thinks they’re all involved with the Mafiya. Sounds a little paranoid between you and me. Even seems to think there’s a contract out to kill him.

  ‘The Major’s holed up with his sister who happens to work at the British Embassy. As a receptionist. She would have been there at the time of your last visit to Kiev a year ago.’

  Sam had a vague memory of a woman with dark hair and blue eyes.

  Kiev. Where he’d first encountered Rybkin. Once he’d established whether the Major was relevant to the Iraqis’ anthrax plan, he would track the former SBU man down, a man with a lot to answer for.

  ‘When?’ he asked.

  ‘Tomorrow. You’ll need to get a visa sorted in the morning. It’ll be a quick trip. Straight in and out. Damn . . .’ Waddell snapped his fingers. ‘To get your visa you need an invitation to go to Kiev from a Ukrainian business. We’ve set up a paper company over there for just that purpose. I’ve got the letter for you, but it’s in my car.’ He stood up feeling in his trouser pocket for the keys. ‘Back in a minute.’

  Alone with Kessler, Sam felt acutely uncomfortable. But not for long, because Kessler took the initiative.

  ‘I’m glad for a moment alone, Sam,’ he began. ‘Something I wanted to say.’ He held up his hands as if in surrender. ‘Forget the past. Forget our . . . conflict. We have a common interest now, do we not?’

  Sam watched the man’s discomfort, reminded unkindly of the squirming of a worm. How much had he known about Chrissie’s life, he wondered? Could it be that he’d tacitly condoned her other relationships as the price for keeping her?

  ‘There’s a smell, Sam,’ said Kessler, cutting through his thoughts. ‘A nasty one, and it’s sticking to Chrissie.’ Sam saw fear in his eyes now. ‘It’s because of the way she died. The circumstances. Too much that hasn’t been explained.’ Kessler’s hands squeezed together until the knuckles went white. ‘It’s a question of what the record will say. In the Firm. I’m sure you would share my wish that Chrissie’s file should be blemish-free.’

  ‘Of course,’ Sam mouthed, taken aback at this appeal.

  ‘It’s why I wanted it to be you who went to Cyprus,’ Kessler explained, crushed-faced. ‘And to Kiev. Wanted someone on the case who had Chrissie’s interests at heart. You do, don’t you?’

  ‘But of course—’

  ‘Yes. So, if there’s anything you can think of that’ll make things smell a little sweeter . . .’

  Sam felt pegged to the chair, convinced suddenly that Kessler wasn’t so much concerned about his dead wife’s reputation as his own. Worried the smell could spread his way.

  ‘I . . .’

  They heard Waddell returning.

  ‘That’s all, Sam,’ Kessler mumbled in conclusion, ‘all I wanted to say. Just that. That it would be best if Chrissie were remembered well.’

  The eyes were as humble as a beggar’s.

  Kessler knows something, thought Sam. Some dark secret, darker than all the others. And suspects that I might know it too.

  28

  Late Afternoon

  Haifa, Israel

  A WEARY ISRAELI official stepped from the customs house on the main quay of Haifa Port and climbed into his car. Onto the seat beside him, he smacked down the clipboard on which he’d fixed a cargo manifest provided by the agents of the ship that had just arrived from Limassol. He’d been on shift since six that morning. He’d had enough for one day. He started up and pointed the wheels towards the container jetties.

  An engine problem had delayed the vessel’s departure from Limassol by a day, and further problems on the voyage had made its arrival here even later than expected. That in turn was delaying his own journey home and the chance to watch the football game his son had taped for him off the satellite sports channel – unless the kid had forgotten.

  There was only one container from the ship that he needed to spot check, a forty footer whose documents listed the contents as vegetable juice. The box had been shipped out of this very port just over two weeks earlier but had been returned by the customer because the goods inside it were defective. That, however, was not the reason for his decision to inspect the box – the return of unsatisfactory goods was a regular enough occurrence. What had caught his attention was simply that the container had begun its return journey in Ukraine, and cargoes from that part of the former Soviet Union were infrequent to say the least. After all, the country had precious little worth exporting.

  Ukraine was a place he’d learned about from a neighbour in the street where he lived halfway up the slopes of Mount Carmel. The man had emigrated from the country three years ago and never stopped telling him to watch out for anything that originated from there because the place was controlled by organised crime.

  He’d had no intelligence to go on. No tip-offs. It was curiosity more than anything else that was drawing him to this particular pier.

  He flicked the wheel to avoid running the tyres into the rail tracks embedded in the road surface, then turned down through a standing area where containers waiting to be stuffed with cargoes for onward movement were stacked three high. Two lifts were working the ship, their massive gantries humping the containers from the deck to the quayside. Tractors and trailers queued up to remove those boxes that were authorised for immediate departure.

  The customs official parked his car well clear of the activity on the quay and strolled over to the dock officer who was checking the container numbers against the manifest.

  ‘You’re in luck. The one you want to look at is next off,’ she told him.

  He watched the rust-red box swing to the shore suspended by steel cables. Once on the dockside a forklift moved it clear of the roadway so the trailer trucks could continue their work. He inspected the wire seal put on by the Ukrainian customs in Odessa, then broke it while the dock officer looked on.

  ‘What’re you expecting?’ she asked.

  ‘Something that don’t smell too good.’

  He unhitched the clasp and swung back the door. The stink was enough to make them flinch. Both of them.

  They stared at the cartons of juice bulging out of their shrink-wrap of polythene. Some had already ruptured. The container floor was wet and sticky. The packs were stacked to within ten centimetres of the container’s roof, leaving just enough space for a torch beam to reach down the gap. Holding his breath, he stepped on the edge of the pallet and aimed the light to the rear of the container. The line of cartons stretched all the way – as far as he could tell.

  He stepped back. There was only one way to be sure that contraband wasn’t hidden in the load and that was to order the removal of every single pallet.

  But it was late. He was tired. And the football game was waiting.

  ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Shut the stink up again.’

  Ninety minutes later the container was driven through the dock gates. The truck turned right onto the Sederot Ha-Hagana and headed for the main road south which led to Tel Aviv, the largest Jewish city that has ever existed.

  29

  Monday, 7 October, a.m.

  London

  STRAIGHT-BACKED AND STIFF-LEGGED like an old soldier much older than his forty-two years, Naif Hamdan pressed the door button on the blue and white commuter train standing at platform seventeen of Waterloo station and stepped inside. He was making an effort to create the impression that he did this every day, despite not having been in London since the warmer climate of the 1980s when Britain had been perfectly happy to sell his country the materials it needed to make c
hemical and biological weapons.

  He chose a window seat and looked round as casually as he could manage to check there were no signs of his being followed. The British visa stamped into his Jordanian passport had secured him easy entry for what he’d declared to be a three-day ‘business’ trip. He was certain that with his almost European looks he had avoided attracting the suspicion of the authorities, but dropping his guard could be fatal.

  Under normal circumstances a gun would be the most suitable tool for the business he had in mind in this country, but it was a difficult object to travel with. Instead, in his heavy Samsonite briefcase were two nine-inch Sabatier kitchen knives still wrapped in the green and gold bag of the Knightsbridge store where he’d bought them an hour ago.

  He’d been shaken by what had happened in Iraq since he left. Shaken, but heartened too by the knowledge that two of his closest co-conspirators had honoured the pledges they’d all made some three months ago. Since learning of their deaths he’d thought constantly of that evening when the four of them at the heart of the affair had sat together in the untidy kitchen of his Baghdad apartment. Curtains tightly closed, a candle in a jam jar for light and a photograph of his dead wife on the fat-spattered wall above the cooker, they’d each placed a bunched fist down on the cheap plastic-laminate surface of the table, knuckles touching, and sworn to die by their own hands if they had to rather than reveal what they’d agreed that night to undertake. After taking the oath they’d raised up their fists, still pressed together like the hub of a wheel, and held them over the candle so the flame would forge their resolve with its fire.

  And now two of the others were dead: his late wife’s brother Dr Husayn Shenassi, a brilliant scientist and a paragon of kindness, and Major Omar Hasan, his adjutant during the 1991 war, who’d been at his side as they’d picked through their regiment’s corpses west of Basra after a decimating raid by B-52s. Dead now, lives taken by their own hands to preserve the secrecy of their conspiracy. But in the choice of who was to die from that original quartet, God had been kind. Husayn and Omar and the handful of men involved with them back in Baghdad had had roles essential only to the development of the plan they’d hatched. The two survivors of that inner council, himself and Sadoun, another major from his regiment, were the ones who’d reserved for themselves the responsibility for its final implementation.

  Hamdan remembered again the resolve they’d all felt at that candle-lit session in his flat. The resolve to rid their nation of its psychopathic leader.

  During the early years of Saddam’s rule, all of them had taken pride in seeing their country grow in prosperity and stature under his tutelage. All had condoned his brutal methods as being little worse than those of men who’d preceded him. But then, as Saddam’s war with Iran dragged on, they’d despaired of the waste in wealth and young men that their leader’s megalomania was bringing about.

  Then finally, with that ill-judged gamble in Kuwait, they’d watched the devastation of their country being made total.

  Hamdan remembered their anguish in the spring of 1991 as he and his defeated fellow officers waited with hope in their hearts for the Americans to sweep up from the south and eradicate their leader. They would not have resisted. Few Iraqis would have done. But the Americans never came, declaring it was for the Iraqi people themselves to remove Saddam Hussein, not them.

  And the Iraqi people had tried. Tens of thousands of corpses bore witness to how hard they’d tried. For their sake, and for the sake of generations to come, it was time for desperate measures to make their sacrifice bear fruit. To think the unthinkable.

  A warning bleeped and the commuter train’s doors slid shut. Hamdan’s heart was pounding. He had no clearly thought-out plan today, just the goal of preserving his secret at any price. With so much blood already shed, a little more would be no burden on his conscience.

  As the train clattered over the points on its way from the terminus, he looked out over the bleak south London landscape of sooty brick terraces and drab office towers. There was little beauty surrounding the people living here, he thought to himself, but there was freedom. Freedom from fear and from tyranny. Only those who were deprived of that freedom could know its true value.

  The culmination of his scheme was still some days away, days of risk in which his desperate plan could be brought to nothing by men who knew too much.

  There were two in London who posed just such a risk. The first he’d tracked down yesterday – a fellow countryman who’d been involved in their plans in a minor role, but who’d feared the very fate Hamdan had in mind for him and had fled to London where he thought he would be safe. He’d found this man too easily yesterday, stumbling across him by accident in a crowded west London street. The man had seen him, recognised him and escaped. But he wouldn’t for long.

  Now it was the turn of the second target, a man who’d looked him in the eye just once. Someone who’d pretended not to know his secret but had known it. A person he’d wanted to eliminate then, but couldn’t if he was to secure the return of Salah Khalil. But now Sam Packer had to die – because he’d seen the face of Naif Hamdan. One man among the ranks of the intelligence agencies massing against him able to pick him out from a crowd was one man too many. And Packer, he’d learned in a discomfiting warning from the Ukrainians, had come dangerously close to the truth in Cyprus. He was a man with a terrier mind, Rybkin had said, a man who lacked caution. A man without the sense to leave things alone that didn’t concern him.

  The Iraqi stared through the window as the streets beside the track became leafier on their journey west. His eyes were unblinking and determined. Doubt and compassion had become unwanted baggage in his life. He knew all about feelings, but knew too they couldn’t be allowed to stand in the way of an action that would change the course of history. If only the men he was seeking could see things from his point of view they would well understand why their lives must end.

  Determined as he was, it worried him that he would have to do it with a knife. Killing that way was a skill he’d never had to practise. Using his pistol to finish off the half-dead Iranian boys who’d tried to storm his regiment’s berms in 1987, their eyes and tongues bursting with mustard blisters – that had been easy enough. And ending the agony of some of his own soldiers in the spring of 1991, their flesh shredded by shrapnel and hanging from their bones – that had been an act of brotherhood made almost simple by the distancing mechanism of a trigger and black powder. But to plunge in a knife, to feel its point break skin and bone and slice down through muscle in its search for an artery, was an act he dreaded.

  The train slowed for a station. He read the sign.

  Barnes.

  He got out. The mournful moustache was gone from his face. With his newly clean-shaven upper lip, a mid-weight, grey worsted suit under a light raincoat and a Samsonite briefcase in his hand, he could have passed for a salesman.

  He’d studied an A-Z of London and had memorised the route from the station to the address Rybkin had supplied him with.

  Ten minutes’ walk should see him there.

  Monday morning had passed quickly for Sam. To the bank for a wad of dollars, to a travel agent for the air ticket and to the Ukrainian Embassy for his visa. Now, at midday, the black taxi that had brought him from Kensington dropped him outside the front door to the mansion block. He hurried inside, not looking left or right, concentrating totally on the task ahead. Whatever outrage was being planned by Colonel Hamdan and his Ukrainian helpers, the time they had in which to prevent it was fast running out.

  There was another good reason for his single-minded concentration on his mission: it stopped him thinking about Chrissie.

  He slung a suitcase on the bed and put in clothes for three or four days. A quick in and out was how Waddell had described the mission, but life was only that simple in the never-never land of desk men.

  There’d been one phone message on the machine yesterday evening after he’d returned from the Banstead Lodge – from
Tom Wallace, checking that he had returned Backgammon to the Hamble. He’d rung his co-owner and spun some yarn as to why the boat was in Guernsey. Wallace had called him a ‘walking disaster area’.

  The flight was at two. One of the Firm’s cars was due any minute. He dressed in a light check suit, chose an Italian silk tie, then made sure of his ticket, money and passport for the umpteenth time.

  The door buzzer sounded. Everything electrical off, he grabbed the grey raincoat from the hook in the hall, locked the front door and descended to the road.

  The driver reached for his case. ‘Take that for you, sir?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Sam had the briefcase in his other hand and the coat over his free arm.

  The car was parked in a road at the side of the mansion block. He opened the rear door and slung his briefcase and raincoat onto the seat. Then, as he watched the driver put the suitcase in the boot, he removed his jacket so it wouldn’t crease.

  He became conscious of quickening footsteps to his left. A glance revealed a tall raincoated man approaching, incongruously wearing dark glasses despite the greyness of the day and with a Kangol cap pulled down hard on his head. The man bore down on him with increasing speed, gripping a large manila envelope.

  Sam froze, certain the man had some desperate purpose and it was to do with him. He stared at the leathery face with its hair and eyes so carefully concealed. The man was clean-shaven. A prominent chin.

  Fear took hold of him. The figure was five paces away and closing fast. His chin jutted forward as if in an involuntary spasm.

  Seen that before, thought Sam. Bloody seen it before!

  The hand holding the envelope jerked up, its fingers gripping the corner like they would a dagger.

  ‘Hey!’ The yell dried in Sam’s throat. He knew who this was now. Christ, he knew!

  Right arm up to protect himself, he balled his left hand into a fist.

  Suddenly, from somewhere close, came the whoop of a police siren. Startled, the assailant faltered. Sam began to step back. The envelope slashed down in a sweeping arc, its corner catching his sleeve. Then his heel caught on a paving stone. He lost his balance and fell.