by Ward Larsen
The Suburban stopped sharply in front of a large, centrally located tent.
“Stay here,” Al-Quatan ordered Roth. The colonel got out of the car, disappeared into the billowing tent for less than a minute, then returned.
“Moustafa Khalif will see you now. Abu will take your bag.”
Roth followed Al-Quatan to the tent. At the entrance were two armed men, these more serious and professional than the ones on the perimeter. It only made sense that Khalif would have his best men nearby. They gave their Israeli guest a rough pat down and a hard stare, then ushered Roth inside as Al-Quatan followed.
In the tent, Roth found a random, asynchronous atmosphere. Plywood floors were partially covered by ornate carpets. A scattered assortment of chairs, couches, and tables were strewn about the place, none seeming to match. A Louis Quinze desk was shoved into one corner, and on top was a ten-gallon jerry can with the word petrol stenciled in big block letters. A large crystal chandelier hung from the center of the tent’s frame, half its light bulbs burned out.
The two security men took up post at the entrance, out of earshot, but with a clear line of sight toward the Israeli. Roth was sure their aim was excellent. Al-Quatan moved off to one side and stood silently. Only then did Roth notice the other person in the room. He rose from a plush sultan’s chair, a tall man with huge olive eyes, a salt-and-pepper beard, and weathered features. Roth recognized him instantly. The man’s arms outstretched in greeting and, dressed in the traditional Arab jellabah, his robe flowed outward, giving the appearance of a huge bird airing its wings.
“Mr. Roth, I am Moustafa Khalif. I am pleased that you have come.”
Roth nodded politely, noticing Khalif made no effort to amplify his greeting with any of the traditional physical add-ons — no Arabic embrace or Western handshake. He looked much like the photos Roth had seen so often in the newspapers back home, perhaps older, a bit grayer.
“I hope your journey was not a difficult one,” Khalif said. His English was measured and deliberate, almost without accent.
“Not difficult, just long,” Roth said.
“Good. I know we are not conveniently located, but you can understand our reasons.” Khalif waved a wing toward an open chair. “Please have a seat.”
Roth chose a sturdy dinner chair as a man in an ill-fitting white servant’s jacket presented a tray of tea. So far, so good.
“Traveling. There is something I am no longer able to do. When I was a child, my parents took me to Italy and Austria. The Sistine Chapel, Vienna, the Alps. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
Khalif gave a wistful sigh and Roth tried to imagine the terrorist as a child. He couldn’t.
“Here, I am a prisoner, surrounded by a desert and a people that are not my own. Still, we are safe, and for the moment that is important. From this place we can pursue our freedom, and someday, if it should be the will of Allah, we will return home. Perhaps then I can travel once again.”
Roth wondered if Khalif really believed it. He sipped his tea with a level gaze, not sure where this was headed.
“Where are you from, Roth? What part of Palestine?”
The bait was obvious and Roth decided the Arab was testing him. “Haifa,” he said. “And it hasn’t been called Palestine for a long, long time.”
Khalif’s eyes narrowed, a hawk gliding above its prey, deciding when to strike. Roth tried to hold steady under the piercing stare. The isolation of his tactical situation suddenly seemed overwhelming. He was alone, unarmed, and surrounded by the enemy. He took another sip of tea, trying to gather his wits. Meandering wouldn’t be to his advantage, so he moved right to the point.
“Did you view the loading process in South Africa?”
Khalif paused before answering, obviously deciding if this was where he wanted the conversation to proceed. He relented. “Of course. We sent one of our best agents. He photographed the loading and we have studied the evidence.”
Roth knew, in fact, that Khalif had rushed his nephew, Fareed, down to South Africa. Hopelessly inept, but completely trustworthy, Fareed had been the only one to meet both requirements — the proper documents to travel on short notice, and a rudimentary knowledge of photography. Roth was also aware that Khalif’s technical range for photo surveillance and imagery interpretation was nothing beyond Fuji film and a magnifying glass.
Khalif continued, “The cargo was in canisters. How do we know what you say about them is true?”
“You saw my partner there. And the kidon. What else would Israel be taking out of South Africa with that kind of secrecy?”
“I would not venture a guess,” Khalif said dryly.
Roth reached under the lapel of his jacket. He sensed a brush of motion from the two security men by the door. He gave the guards a plaintive look as he slowly pulled out an envelope and handed it to Khalif.
Khalif found four photographs in the envelope. He laid them out on a table and gestured for Al-Quatan to join in. The two men studied the photos carefully for a few moments. Roth watched their expressions intently.
“How can we be sure?” Al-Quatan said in a harsh whisper.
“My associate inspected them before they were canistered,” Roth explained. “He also took these pictures for my government. It wasn’t easy to get copies.”
Khalif looked at the photos again, then asked, “Where are they now?”
“At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.”
The two Arabs looked at one another in amazement.
“Imbecile!” Al-Quatan exploded. “You said you would—”
Khalif cut him off with a sharp wave.
“You must be patient,” Roth said.
“How?” Khalif wondered. “How will it be done?”
Roth told them how the weapons would be retrieved, his eyes darting back and forth between his customers. The explanation seemed to settle Al-Quatan and eventually drew a smile across Khalif’s thin lips. Roth could tell he liked the plan.
“And you also have the technical data?”
“Of course. That was part of our agreement. But there is one thing,” Roth added, his voice cracking just slightly. “It has become more expensive than I thought. I’ll need more money.”
Khalif raised an eyebrow, but it was Al-Quatan who spoke angrily. “We have already agreed on a fair price! You are in no position to negotiate!”
Roth looked at Khalif, pointedly ignoring the underling. “The cost of executing our plan is greater than I expected. And afterwards, it will be very difficult, very costly for my friend and I to disappear. You know how my country can be about tracking down its enemies.”
Khalif turned away. Clasping his hands behind his back, he moved slowly across the room. Roth felt his heart pulse. Sweat began to bead again.
When Khalif turned back, the wrath in his eyes and the hiss of his voice were venomous as he leveled a finger at Roth. “You are not an enemy to your country! An enemy fights with honor. You are a traitor! And you and your friend would betray me as quickly as you have betrayed your own people. I will pay the agreed upon amount. Half soon, then half when we have received the shipment and verified it to be authentic. What happens to you afterwards, I do not care. But trust in this — if either of you attempt to deceive us in any way, we will come for you. And we will give evidence to your own country that you have betrayed them.”
Al-Quatan laughed, “For once Palestine and the Zionist pigs would be united in a cause. That of finding and destroying two wretched little weasels.”
Khalif was apparently finished with his outburst and Roth stayed calm. A gradual smirk came across the Arab’s face and he clapped his hands twice.
From behind, Roth heard a familiar, sultry woman’s voice, “Mmm, Pytor. It’s been so long.”
Roth turned to see Avetta. She looked better than ever, her silken black hair framing classic features and flawless skin. The layers of her robe could not hide the full, ripe young body that swayed beneath. Sweeping by Roth, she looked just as she had the first day he’d
seen her, almost a year ago, only now the expression was different. The chin a bit higher, the black oval eyes no longer innocent but knowing, and her full lips showed the hint of a smile. She moved beside Khalif, victorious.
“I believe you know one another,” Khalif prodded.
Roth frowned, briefly wondering what her real name might be. He was also curious as to why Khalif had seen the need for her presence. “You don’t have to prove your point,” he said.
“I think I do,” Khalif countered. “I think it is important that you know exactly where you stand.” Khalif produced his own small stack of photographs and handed them to Avetta. She walked over to Roth and held up a few for the Israeli to see. Grainy and undeniable, they’d been taken in a cheap hotel in Beirut, showing the two of them engaged in various acts of indiscretion. Roth looked right past the photographs as Avetta waved them tauntingly in front of him.
“I’ve seen them before.”
“Some of them,” Khalif said. “There are others. But this thing you do for us now, there is little evidence of it. Understand, traitor, we can give these to your government at any time, along with samples of the documents you passed on to us. You were very cooperative when your paramour asked for these things.”
“I was cooperative with a prostitute who was blackmailing me.”
Avetta dropped the photographs and slapped Roth hard across the face. The room was silent for a moment before Colonel Al-Quatan started to laugh. Avetta gave him a hard look that was mirrored by Khalif, and Al-Quatan’s humor evaporated.
“A prostitute acts for money,” Khalif spat, “but not my Seema. She had a far more honorable purpose, and she succeeded magnificently.”
“Your who?” Roth queried.
“Seema is my eldest daughter. Doesn’t it make the pictures even more meaningful? You, a sergeant in Aman, a married father of four, taken by the daughter of your country’s most bitter enemy.”
Roth was caught off guard, amazed that Khalif could use his own daughter in such a way. He’d never understand the things these people did in the name of religion. Holy War was enough of an oxymoron, but this was new territory.
“I understand my position,” Roth admitted. “As of today, my career in the Israeli army is over. I’m a deserter.” And an ex-husband, he thought, even though the marriage had been cold for years. “A successful outcome is more important to me than you. It’s my only chance.”
“Good. Then we understand each other.”
Seema was dismissed and Roth felt the worst was over when Khalif and Al-Quatan pursued the details of the financial transfer. Finally, they discussed how the delivery would take place. Roth’s idea bred hesitation at first, but Al-Quatan liked it, so Khalif consented. “It’s the safest way,” Roth said of the transfer. Then he tried to sound casual in reciting the precise words he’d been forced to practice a hundred times.
“Keep in mind, these are highly complex devices, not to mention valuable. I trust you’ve made plans as to how you’ll handle them once they’re yours?”
Al-Quatan answered. “We have made all the arrangements. Security and technical help will be the best.”
Roth nodded and Khalif raised his voice to summon the two guards. “Escort Sergeant Roth to his quarters. He will return to Tripoli in the morning.”
As he left, Khalif reminded him, “Nine days, Mr. Roth. Nine days.”
The makeshift control room was set up in the officers’ mess aboard Hanit. The room had been chosen for logistical reasons — adequate electrical supply, good ventilation, and right next door was the ship’s hardened Weapons and Maneuver Control Center. The ship’s officers were not consulted, most finding out at the evening meal that their lone retreat had been commandeered by the annoyingly chipper little man who had boarded two days earlier in Marseille. Paul Mordechai had transformed the dark, formally decorated dining area into an entropic scattering of equipment and wires.
The ship’s captain looked over Mordechai’s shoulder as he sat glued to a video monitor. The sprightly engineer had been in the same seat for over three hours, yet showed no lack of patience or enthusiasm. He wore a headset with a boom microphone and his face was illuminated by the machine’s flickering glow.
The ROV was a “fly out” model. Sent to the bottom on an umbilical, it then separated and took guidance signals out to two hundred meters. A 50-watt quartz halogen light was boresighted to track the digital camera, and images were transmitted to the docking rig, then relayed topside by way of the umbilical.
To the uninitiated, the pictures might have seemed relentlessly monotonous. The flat mud on the ocean floor had almost no contour, like the moon without craters. The highlights for the last hour had included a crumpled beer can that looked like it might have been there since World War II, and a pair of undulating worms who poked their heads out of the muck, miniature cobras swaying to the song of some unseen charmer.
“Shouldn’t we have found something by now?” the captain asked.
“Needle in a haystack, Captain.”
“But we’re still getting two good signals from those beacons. Strong signals.”
Mordechai manipulated a joystick and the view on the monitor began a shift to the right. “Just makes the haystack smaller, needles don’t get any bigger.”
The captain frowned.
“Our biggest problem is stability.” Mordechai pointed to the display. “Your ship is drifting. Not much, but enough to screw up our search matrix. We can only use the engines to adjust forward and aft. I could make a better system. Put a differential GPS on the drone, something to compare its exact position and drift relative to the ship. Then we’d install some side thrusters with digital control on Hanit and write up software to automate the corrections. The way it is now, with everything done manually and only one axis of movement, by the time we correct one way, the drone is drifting to the other. Ends up with divergent oscillations. Same thing can happen in aircraft flight control software.”
“How comforting,” the captain deadpanned, obviously lost.
Mordechai smiled and keyed his microphone, “Ten forward.”
In the adjoining control room a lieutenant engaged the screws to push a thousand tons of warship gently ahead, then reversed them momentarily to stop.
“Still seems to me we should have found something by now. Polaris Venture was 150 feet along the waterline. Even if she broke up, there ought to be some pretty big pieces down there.”
Mordechai had no reply, primarily because he was more and more bedeviled by the same question. They had locked onto both beacons, getting good signals every thirty minutes. By his own calculations, considering antennae errors and thermal deviations, there was a ninety percent chance that Polaris Venture was within a two-square-kilometer area on the ocean floor below. They had covered that entire search box once already and found nothing. The other ten percent was weighing greatly on Mordechai when he finally saw something.
“There!” he shouted.
A grainy, squarish image appeared on the monitor.
Mordechai yelled into his microphone, “Mark one!” He worked the joystick furiously, repeatedly pressing a button that took magnified pictures of the image almost two miles below. Rocking nervously in his chair, he now understood why Polaris Venture had been so hard to find. “Where’s the other one? Where’s the other?” he mumbled.
“I don’t know what that is you’ve found,” the captain said, “but it’s not part of a ship. At least not any part I recognize.”
Mordechai held his drone directly over the small box, then tilted upward so the camera and beam of light spread out level across the bottom. He then slowly rotated to the left. The small cone of illumination arced across a barren submarine landscape, a tiny lighthouse in one of the world’s darkest corners. After ninety degrees of rotation he stopped and zoomed in.
“There,” Mordechai said.
Another object, a twin to the first, came into view.
“Mark two, bearing three-three-zero,
ten meters from mark one. Captain, have the radio operator stand by for a secure uplink. We’ve got a very important message to send.”
“That’s it? I thought we were looking for a ship.”
“We are,” said a dispirited Mordechai. “But we won’t find it here.”
Chapter Twelve
Christine guided the small Ford through Dorset countryside as they made their way back to the region where the odyssey had begun, the rural Celtic counties of the southwest coast. They had abandoned the rented Peugeot in Southampton, leaving it a few blocks from The Excelsior in a crowded lot. How David had acquired this car was a mystery to Christine. It seemed mechanically sound, but was frightful to look at. Probably twenty years old, it seemed held together by an amalgam of rust and putty. The back window was plastered over with stickers, supporting the likes of the Green Party and a musical group called Throbbing Gristle. The odometer had simply stopped working at 217,768 and both rear fenders displayed damage from what looked like two separate incidents, although Slaton had assured Christine that all required lights and vital moving parts were functional. She guessed that he’d stolen the car, hoping no one would miss it, or perhaps figuring the owner was likely a budding criminal or an anarchist, the type of person who would avoid any intentional contact with the police.
David was asleep in the passenger seat. Christine had offered to drive, knowing there was no way she’d be able to get any rest. The image of two masked men and the flashes of their weapons kept flooding her thoughts. Once again her protector seemed to be a step ahead of these madmen, but how long could it last? She heard David rustle, as he’d done time and again over the last two hours. He wasn’t sleeping well, but Christine suspected it had nothing to do with what had gone on at The Excelsior. His eyes opened groggily.
“Where are we?” he asked, with a glance at his watch.
“Almost to Dorchester.”
He straightened up and stretched. “You made good time.”
“Feel any better after the rest?”
“Sure.”
Christine thought he still looked tired. In the days she’d been with him he’d never slept more than a few hours at a time. That wasn’t good. She’d worked enough twenty-four hour shifts in her residency to know that recurring lack of sleep could seriously cloud a person’s judgment.
