The Alamut Ambush dda-2

by Anthony Price

  'Especially by dog-lovers.' Audley took the jibe on the chin.

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  'Quickly – and painlessly if possible. And without hate.'

  For one long-lasting moment the Englishman and the Egyptian stared at each other, oblivious of everyone else.

  'Especially by dog-lovers,' Razzak echoed him suddenly, but this time without any irony in his voice.

  This, Roskill realised, was as far as Audley would ever go towards admitting what his wife said he felt for the poor bloody Middle East, snarled up now in a quarrel as impossible to resolve as an Escher engraving – with its little men trudging forever up a staircase joined to itself . . . Conscience or idealism – or exasperation – whatever it was, Audley was offering it to Razzak now in exchange for the man's trust.

  'And Squadron Leader Roskill – and Major Butler?' said Razzak softly. 'Dog-lovers too?'

  'Hugh is with me. He wants what we both want – '

  ' – And I want nothing,' said Butler. 'Except my head examining . . . I'm on my own time here. So if this country isn't involved you can trust me. If it is, you can't.'

  Razzak considered them.

  'Very well, then,' he shook his head, as if to emphasise the folly of his decision. 'It seems we have to trust each other...

  'But you weren't quite right just now, Audley – nobody trusted me specially to do this dirty job. I won it by right of my own stupidity!' He tapped his chest. 'I'm the man Hassan once told all his plans to. And I let him walk away – I let him simply walk away.'

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  Razzak took a deep breath before continuing. 'I Suppose it wasn't altogether my fault. It was the first night of the June War, and I had other things on my mind.' He closed his eyes for an instant, as though to refresh his memory with darkness.

  'We were taking a rest about fifteen kilometres from Jebl Libni.

  There was a truck bogged down off the road – crew gone, but it gave us some shelter from the wind. It gets cold in the Sinai at night... In the daytime you've got the heat and the dust, and half the flies in the world – but at night you can't keep warm sometimes.

  That's the Sinai for you...' Razzak shivered, then caught hold of the thread again. 'I heard the scrape of his boots on the road – if hadn't I might have shot him, but he was wearing his boots so I didn't.'

  His boots?

  Razzak answered the question before it was asked. 'You know, they throw away their boots, our soldiers do, when they're running away ... First their rifles, then their boots. But he'd still got his boots – he'd got four waterbottles, a machine pistol and his boots, so I reckoned he was maybe an officer or a technician, and I thought he might know how things were up front. But he knew even less than I did. All he knew was that we were finished already.'

  Razzak couldn't keep the ache of bitterness out of his voice.

  Roskill was suddenly put in mind of old Havergal the night before: to know one's own honour was still whole, but to be ashamed of one's own country — what sort of trauma, what sort of deviation, dummy2

  that might produce was outside his experience. But it might well put a man outside the normal rules.

  'He didn't need to have it spelt out for him. He'd seen their planes, and he hadn't seen ours. He knew, Hassan did.' For a moment he was lost again.

  'You're sure he was Hassan? He called himself that?'

  'He called himself nothing, Dr. Audley. He never said who he was or what he was – he was just one ice-cold angry man. I've met some angry men these last three years, but never one as cold as that

  – he was like burning ice that strips your skin off. I think if I'd been on my own he'd have shot me – not to get my water bottle, but just because he thought I was running away!'

  'But you weren't – and he was, damn it!' Butler cut in.

  Razzak shook his head. 'Who was running away and who wasn't?

  I've never been quite sure which I was doing – maybe I was running. And Hassan certainly didn't think he was running away from his enemy. I believe he felt he was running towards him for the first time in his life!

  'You see, when I saw how angry he was – he was spoiling for a fight – I asked him to join us. But he said I was a great fool ... and he asked me to join him...'

  ' ... to kill a few Jews and then be killed yourself – where is the purpose in that? Any street urchin can do as much with a grenade in the market place, to no purpose. But if you're set on dying, I can show you how to die usefully. These Jews – they are the last enemy, not the first. We Arabs must root out the enemy within first dummy2

  – the selfish ones and the cowards, the little men in the big uniforms. The men who put their countries' politics before the Arab destiny...'

  'I asked him how he proposed to do what even Gamal Abdul Nasser hadn't been able to do. He said: "The same way the old Hashashin did – you kill those men who stand against you or in your way, so that your chosen friends can step into their places."

  'And then, when I'd turned him down, he talked to me – or at me, if you like. I suppose he thought he was talking to a dead man, so it didn't matter. But I think he needed to talk to someone very badly at that moment — to tell just one person about his great new idea for uniting all the Arabs, and just how it would work. And by the will of God it was to me he talked!'

  'But you weren't tempted?' said Butler.

  'Tempted?' Razzak stared at Butler. 'Would you have been tempted, Major? Politics by assassination?'

  'Bloody nonsense,' grunted Butler. 'I beg your pardon, Miss Hunter, but that's what it is. I agree with Audley – you'd likely get a worse lot, and then you'd have to make a habit of it.'

  "I agree! That's just what I thought it was. The pity of it was that I didn't take him seriously – I thought the sun had touched his brains... but then he thought I was crazy too, and when he'd talked himself out he went off on his madness and I went off on mine. It never occurred to me to put a bullet in his back – he didn't seem that important.'

  That had been quite a meeting under the bogged-down lorry in the dummy2

  desert, thought Roskill: two angles of the Firle triangle. And the third angle not so very far away either – somewhere to the north-east Jake Shapiro's tank recovery team would already have been in action.

  But the drama of the occasion seemed to have escaped Audley.

  'And just when did you start to take him seriously? When the Alamut List turned up?'

  Razzak gave him a crooked smile. 'It wasn't I who took him seriously – I forgot about him. But he didn't forget me, Audley: he was fool enough to take me seriously. You know, the funny thing is that I let him go and he came back to me of his own free will –

  it's enough to make you weep!'

  'How – ?'

  'Let me tell it my own way. It'll amuse you, I promise you.' Razzak lifted his maimed hand. 'When I came back with this – and my stiff knee – they said I was no good for a soldier any more. So they gave me back my old security job – except it was a sinecure now because I had one of Safari's bright young men to do the work.

  Huh!

  'And I also had another bright young man – a Palestinian – to keep an eye on me, just so I wouldn't tangle with any more Russians.

  Huh! But a good boy in his way all the same . ..

  ' . . . A good boy with a hot-headed little sister in the Gaza strip. A hot-headed little grenade-throwing sister, whom the Israelis promptly picked up with their usual efficiency.

  'But when my boy went to all his clever friends to try and spring dummy2

  his little sister, he found they couldn't help him – or they wouldn't help him. Or they thought another martyr for the cause would be a good thing. So in the end he came to old Razzak as a last resort.

  And I fixed it for him. No, Audley, not through Jake Shapiro.

  There are other ways such small things can be done ... judiciously.

  'And that put my young watchdog in an awkward position, because he now had an obligation to me.'


  ' "He that doeth good shall be rewarded with what is better",'

  murmured Audley.

  'Ah! The devil quoting the scriptures!' Razzak grinned. ' "And shall be secure from the terrors of that day. But those that have done evil shall be hurled down into the Fire." Very good, Audley – and my young man paid his obligation by telling me a story. But it happened to be a story I'd already heard once — in the Sinai.

  'Only then it was just a mad idea, and now it had turned into reality

  – and my story-teller was part of it.'

  'Part of it?'

  'I thought he was Safari's man. In fact he was one of Hassan's

  "Watchers" – Al-Rukba'n he calls them. They're the ones who have been drawing up the blueprints for the kills and keeping an eye on people like me.'

  'I would have thought there was a simpler way with people like you,' said Butler. 'And you particularly.'

  'Ah – that's because you think Hassan's like all the rest of them, just one more indiscriminate killer. But he's not, and that's what makes him strong! He's a discriminate killer – what makes his men dummy2

  believe in him is that he says too many Arabs have died already.

  He sees himself as a surgeon, not a butcher – believe me, Major, I know.'

  'You know – that's just it. You're a danger to him.'

  Razzak shook his head.

  'Major, I don't propose to bore you with Hassan's organisation – it's only his version of the "cell" system. No single cell knows enough to be dangerous and Hassan liimself is the only link between them

  – it's a very small set-up.'

  'But the Ryle Foundation – ' Roskill began.

  'He uses it certainly. But it's also part of the illusion he meant to build. Rumours – but when you grasp at them they vanish; incidents that don't lead you anywhere. Squadron Leader, Hassan's like a conjuror who makes a great play of concealing something that wasn't ever there in the first place!'

  'Then what is there? Is there anything at all?'

  'What is there?' Razzak's expression hardened. 'There's a precision killing machine that was all ready and waiting before the conjuring tricks started.'

  Roskill stared at him. It was just as Audley had said: the psychological warfare was a preparation – the fear of the assassin that had turned his knees to jelly in Bunnock Street. The fear that Cox and Shapiro and Audley had each echoed. The bomb wired to the ignition and the rifleman crouching in wait on the roof-top ...

  'So what have you done about it?' Butler said.

  'Until this week, Major – nothing.'

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  'Nothing!'

  'Major, the one new thing my Watcher told me was that our security system was penetrated. And not just by him either.' The Egyptian sighed. 'Now – you tell me how you'd move against someone who'd already got you staked out – you tell me.'

  He looked around contemptuously. 'The only reason I'm alive and here now is that I've done nothing – I've sat on my arse for four mouths biting my nails and pretending to be even more stupid than I am.'

  'Until now,' said Audley quietly.

  'Until now. And I'll tell you for why – '

  'Because sooner or later Hassan had to make contact with his Watchers. Or they have to make contact with him. And that's the moment when he's vulnerable. If his security is as good as you say, it's the only moment.'

  Razzak looked at Audley approvingly. 'Very good, Audley– '

  'Not very good at all, merely logical. Without the Watchers, Hassan is nothing – he's the will, but they are the brains. The killers are nothing too – ten a penny in the bazaar. And your problem isn't new, Razzak.'

  'My problem?'

  'You can't trust your own service. We had a section in one of the Gulf states that went sour on us in – it doesn't matter when. But there was a job to do there, and we couldn't trust them to do it. So we gave it to someone else altogether – someone who wasn't dummy2

  exactly friendly, but who had the same interest in this case.'

  Mina al Khasab – the oil refinery affair! It had been department scuttlebutt that Audley had used the Russians to evict the Chinese...

  'There's nothing new under the sun, Colonel Razzak. Somehow you know where Hassan's going to meet his Watchers. The new Alamut. But you can't get at it yourself and Jake Shapiro can.'

  Roskill frowned – if that was it, then the risk Razzak was taking was enormous. But, by God, once he'd taken it – once he'd argued the Israelis into taking his chestnuts out of the fire – the picture changed altogether.

  It wasn't just that he was bypassing Hassan's Watchers – and with men whose efficiency far surpassed the Arab intelligence services

  – but that if anything went wrong it would be the Israelis who carried the can: to Hassan and to the world at large it would be just another instance of the Jews slapping at one of the terrorist gadflies with their usual heavy hand.

  Either way, with any luck, both Razzak and Egypt would be in the clear –

  Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety ...

  He looked at the Egyptian with new respect. A dove – maybe; a patriotic Egyptian – beyond doubt. But above all a cunning bastard after Audley's own heart!

  'But wait a moment!' Butler exclaimed. 'If you know where Hassan's meeting his people, why do you need the Israelis? You don't have to use your security men now. A squad of paratroops could do your work for you.'

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  'It isn't as easy as that, Major,' Razzak shook his head. 'Alamut —

  if we can call it that – isn't a place any more, not a secret hideout I can point to on a map and say "There – that's Alamut!"' The second finger that did service for the lost trigger finger tapped the arm of the chair, and then was lost in the fist that struck down on the place it had been tapping. 'I can't say "Bang – that was Alamut!" '

  He waved Butler down. 'I don't even know what Hassan looks like

  – medium build, medium height, moustache maybe, dark glasses perhaps – I only know where he will be at a point in time. Alamut is not somewhere – it is a time, not a place.. .'

  'It can be on Cloud Nine for all I care,' Butler snapped. 'They meet there and you want to hit them for six. But you can't get at them. Is it in Israel?'

  'Israel?' The disbelief in Razzak's voice was answer enough.

  'Not Israel then. And obviously not in Egypt. So one of the others, where your writ does not run — but neither does Israel's either. So why Israel? Why not your Russian allies – they don't want trouble either – ' Butler's eyes settled for a second on Audley ' — and they've been known to do other people's dirty work?'

  'Major Butler – ' Audley began. Butler cut him short. 'No, Audley.

  Maybe it feels right to you, and maybe history repeats itself — but I have to have facts to swallow. I want a plain answer.'

  'And I will give you one,' Razzak held up his hand. 'I accept Major Butler's disbelief. Six months ago I would have agreed with him –

  and even now it's not something I'm doing willingly.'

  Razzak lifted his chins and stared down his squashed nose at dummy2

  Butler. If it had been a lean face and a hawkish nose it would have been a proud look, even an arrogant one. So that, thought Roskill, was probably what it was.

  'Major, this man Hassan is very confident of himself but he is also very careful. If anything happened now – anything — to make him think that maybe he's not been so clever, then there will be no Alamut tomorrow.'

  'Tomorrow!'

  'Less than thirty-six hours from now. And I'll never get another chance like this – not a chance to take Hassan and Watchers in one bite.'

  Razzak sat forward. 'But you are right, Major – I could ask the Russians. Or the Syrians – and even the Iraqis too, though as things stand between us that would hardly be wise. But all of them are belter placed to take Alamut if I offered it to them. But having taken it, would they destroy it? Or I wonder – would they use Hassan for
themselves?'

  He grimaced. 'I think they would be tempted. But even if they weren't I think they're no more secure than we are. I think they'd scare him off, Major.'

  The Egyptian's tone was carefully controlled: only the words themselves conveyed the distrust and contempt he evidently felt for his allies and fellow-Arabs.

  'So you prefer your enemies?'

  'When my enemies have identical interests – I'd make a treaty with the devil himself, Major.'

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  A slow smile cracked Butler's face. Whether by accident or intuition, Razzak was speaking Butler's language now – the language of pragmatic patriotism, which measured friendship neither by blood nor past history, but by the calculation of mutual benefits.

  'The same interests,' said Audley, 'but not the same opportunity for temptation perhaps?'

  'Hah!' Razzak chuckled. 'There you have the answer in a nutshell –

  but less than that even. The Israelis have no opportunity at all!

  They can do what I want or they can do nothing at all. What you call a Hobson's Choice.'

  'It seems that you've managed things rather well, then, Colonel.'

  'No, Dr. Audley. It's simply that Alamut has left us only a Hobson's Choice to make.'

  Razzak nodded at Butler. 'You guessed very close actually, Major.

  "Cloud Nine" you said. You see, Hassan is meeting his friends on tomorrow evening's Trans-Levant flight from Aleppo to Mosul.'

  XIV

  'TOMORROW EVENING'S ORDINARY, scheduled flight.'

  Razzak showed his teeth, beautiful white even teeth, as incongruous in his ugly face as those liquid brown eyes. 'But if you had ever tried to book a seat on this particular flight you would have failed. And I'd guess the regular crew won't be flying dummy2

  tomorrow either, for one reason or another. It might even be hard to find out which of Trans-Levant's fleet it'll be, too, until the very last moment. But otherwise – an ordinary flight, yes!'

  'Good God Almighty!' Butler exploded. 'Man – are you sure?

  Because if you're wrong – '

  'Because if I'm wrong, what I propose to do would be a crime?'