The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  He picked up the medal again and smiled slightly. The port captain had threatened to arrest him. But it was too late. Fait accompli. His ship was saved.

  His officers had returned to England until the repairs were completed, but Ogilvy had stayed aboard LEVIATHAN with the skeleton crew. He felt closer to the behemoth than ever before. Day after day he sat alone on the bridge in a high leather chair watching the work on the distant bows. What was it the Chinese said? Save a man’s life and you were responsible for him forever. The same, he imagined, with a ship.

  The match flared out.

  Hardin stepped back to the galley, removed a second match from the bottle, put back the stopper, and lighted the match. The flame stood tall. He walked slowly across the cabin, shielding the flame from the breeze of his movement, and held it above the cushions. It flickered, leaned forward, and went out. A thin plume of smoke raced over the waiting pyre.

  Patiently, Hardin turned to the galley for another match. Cool air whiffled down the main hatch and fanned his face. He paused uncertainly. He hadn’t yet signaled the power. Then the boom creaked overhead and the words in his mind began to sound like the torment of a stranger.

  As if in a trance, he climbed onto deck. He saw the spinnaker lying in the water, its clew caught on a stanchion. Automatically, he hauled it aboard, spilling out the water. Overhead the main crackled. The boom ran out to starboard. Hardin cleated the sheet.

  A little wake bubbled astern. Catspaws rippled the water. A gust riled the smooth spots between them, and the Swan burbled upon a small white bow wave.

  The radio gave him the time, the date, and the weather reports. The wind was the leading edge of an intense high-pressure system that was chasing up the Indian Ocean after the receding monsoon. He remembered the empty fuel tanks and shut the radio. No engine, no generator, no way to charge the batteries. His last log entry was four days ago and it ended with a meaningless jumble of words and symbols.

  He was deposited quite suddenly the next day in the hot, damp, hazy monsoon. The great moving air mass drew the Swan within itself, and its powerful winds propelled the sailboat over large rolling seas, which moved as steadily and predictably as the wind, offering great speed for little risk.

  Blowing spray and dense humidity soaked everything, and only the constant wind filling the paired headsails was consolation for the misery of the damp heat. Water gathered everywhere—on the decks and fittings, inside and out. It dripped from the ceilings, soaked the bedding, slicked the cabin sole, saturated his charts, drenched the biscuits, and weakened the batteries.

  They were going. The tugs were alongside, the crew gathered from the pubs and brothels of Capetown, the officers flown in from England and Bahrain, the fuel bunkers filled, the galley provisioned.

  Ogilvy’s new chair stood almost amidships the bridge, directly in front of the windows just starboard of the helmsman’s line of sight. Seated, the captain was as tall as when he stood. He used the wooden ledge beneath the windows as a deck.

  “Yes, Number Two?”

  “The pilots are aboard, sir. We’re ready to sail.”

  “Send them to me.”

  LEVIATHAN was pointing north, up the coast of the exposed bay. Bloody useless anchorage—how many nights had he lain in his cabin while LEVIATHAN, tethered by her anchors, rolled abysmally on the northwest combers that disrupted the harbor like football rabble trampling a village green.

  The pilot, a big false smile on his round face, stepped toward him, his hand extended. His assistant grinned behind him, equally blond and round faced.

  “Not to worry, Captain. We’ll have her out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

  Ogilvy remained seated, his hands in his lap. He had never liked the South Africans’ siege mentality, and the refitting of LEVIATHAN had confirmed his prejudices. They never stopped worrying about their precious coasts, and they hated the oil tankers almost as much as they feared the blacks who were going to push them into the sea.

  He gave the pilots a hostile glare, then exercised a captain’s prerogative.

  “You, sir,” he addressed the senior pilot. “You will stand right here and answer my questions, if I have any. I’m quite familiar with your harbor, having negotiated it without a ruddy pilot in a gale and having lived in it aboard this ship long enough to know its channels.”

  The pilot started to open his mouth.

  “Number Two,” cried Ogilvy. “Prepare to get underway.”

  He walked onto the starboard wing to supervise weighing the anchors. Tugs scurried beneath the hull, and spectators gawked from the outer breakwater of Duncan Dock and from small boats that were buzzing around LEVIATHAN like flies.

  She shuddered to life. Her propellers churned the water, roiling the harbor’s gray bottom mud. She turned majestically, shook off the tugs, and steamed toward the open sea.

  20

  El Al’s Nairobi–Tel Aviv flight took to the air and the young Israeli in the next seat asked Miles Donner if he was a tourist. He wore khaki pants and a faded bush jacket and he regarded Donner’s expensive clothes and cameras with open hostility.

  “I have business in Jerusalem,” Donner said gently.

  “Are you British?”

  “Yes,” said Donner. His eyes were glazed with exhaustion; he had been about to go to bed for his last night in Capetown when the orders had come to report to Mossad headquarters. Eight-hour flight to Nairobi, three-hour wait at the airport, and now six more to go. Then across Israel and face the music without sleep. He would drink wine and try to sleep on the plane. And not worry about the reason for the sudden call.

  “Are you a Jew?” asked his companion. He had the open, assured, almost arrogant manner of a Sabra.

  “Yes,” said Donner. “What were you doing in Nairobi?”

  The man grimaced. “Agricultural advisor. Twelve months in the bush.”

  “I imagine you’ll be happy to get home.”

  He replied with a Mediterranean shrug. “Have you been in Israel recently?”

  Miles nodded.

  “I hear it’s worse. The prices.” Again the shrug. Then his dark eyes flashed angrily. “Of course prices wouldn’t bother you.”

  Donner laughed. “When did you ever meet a wealthy Englishman?”

  That got a big grin from the Sabra’s bold mouth, but his suntanned face turned cold when he spotted Miles’s expensive watch. “Do you send trees?” he asked bleakly.

  Miles thought of the Palestine of his childhood, when the gardens were oddities—new oases in the desert or remote islands in the sodden marsh. He met a lot of young people like this Sabra in the Mossad. Life was hard in Israel, still, but no longer harsh, and now the young poor resented the older rich.

  The Sabra stared at him, waiting an answer.

  “Forests.”

  Donner had to suppress his excitement while the jet liner bumped across Lod Airport. As a British photographer on assignment, his cover would not include joy in homecoming. He let the Sabra do it for him. Before the plane stopped, the young man was out of his seat, his face split by a big grin, his eyes wet.

  “Shalom,” said Donner.

  “Shalom!” said the Sabra, tearing down the aisle ahead of the other passengers.

  Donner used his British passport, then escorted his bags through customs like the legitimate passengers and boarded a bus to the center of Tel Aviv. With the continuing migration of Jews from North Africa and the open air shops and restaurants they favored, the city was looking and smelling more and more Eastern Mediterranean, more Arab than European. He checked into the Hilton, showered, stole an absolutely vital two hours of sleep, telephoned Weintraub, and took a city bus some five miles to the Mossad. He rationalized the sleep. If it had been a genuine emergency, there were ways to meet him at the airport without exposing his cover.

  Well before the bus stopped a hundred fifty yards from the ring of buildings encircled with heavy wire-mesh fencing, it contained only Donner. Around the outside of the fenc
e was a wide, clear, flat space. Donner walked past the sun-baked earth to the single gate, showed a pass, and went around the massive circular block of main buildings to a smaller structure in back. The Mossad lived frugally, but it had its own security, including closed-circuit television and electronic sensors.

  The headquarters staff were as casual in the presence of command as any Israelis, but after he had passed the third checkpoint and was deep in the restricted areas, the young men and women stood to acknowledge him as he passed their desks. His escort ushered him into the Chief’s office and there the courtesy ended.

  The Chief was a balding, painfully thin man ten years Donner’s senior. His khaki shirt was too big for his emaciated chest, and inappropriate to his dead-white skin. He looked Donner over with unconcealed distaste.

  Zwi Weintraub was with him. Weintraub was a veteran of the Irgun terrorist cadres of Partition times, and Donner’s friend and mentor. Red-faced and plump, he embraced Donner warmly. Hard muscle slid beneath his flesh. He said to the Chief, “You remember Miles?”

  “Vividly.” In 1973 the Chief had been a field agent—his cover a philology chair at a German university—when both he and Donner independently had unearthed details of the Egyptian-Syrian attack plans. Two simultaneous sources had seemed too much for the Mossad intelligence analysts. They had suspected a plant and hesitated, and the philologist had, correctly and unfairly, blamed Donner for the fiasco. It was a rare lapse of logic. He was still essentially a professor, a devout believer in procedure and academic clarity.

  “Hello,” said Donner. “Congratulations on your appointment.”

  “I’m not so sure that the Service needed an aging field agent at its head,” the Chief replied stiffly. “We will see if congratulations are in order in the months to come.”

  “Congratulations on your personal achievement, then,” Donner amended with a smile.

  “You rate personal achievement too highly, Donner. Your attitude leads to things like this plan you’ve concocted with Weintraub.”

  Donner raised a gently admonishing hand. “The fault is mine. My plan.”

  “I thought so.” The Chief glanced at Weintraub. The old man returned a placid smile.

  “What do you think of it?” asked Donner when he saw that Weintraub wasn’t going to reply.

  “Lunacy,” snapped the Chief. “We are a legitimate nation and legitimate nations do not underwrite piracy on the high seas.”

  “Our legitimacy is still questioned by our enemies,” Donner retorted.

  “You would make us new enemies.”

  Weintraub frowned and his face lost most of its innocuous roundness. “It is a good plan,” he said seriously. “It is bold, and yet it represents low risk to us, and it just might succeed brilliantly.”

  “Even if it were all that,” replied the Chief, “it would be the kind of special operation that belongs to The Unit. Not to a station head or a field agent.”

  “The Unit didn’t think of it,” said Donner.

  “It is to be terminated.”

  Donner was stunned. He had expected argument, but not outright condemnation. He turned to Weintraub. Zwi smiled reassuringly. “Miles’s plan,” he said, “is on this afternoon’s agenda. The Ministers’ Committee for Security and Foreign Affairs will decide.”

  The Mossad Chief looked angry. The Committee consisted of the Prime Minister and his top ministers and advisors. Weintraub was a member, as was the current head of the Mossad. The old man had taken an internal policy decision out of the Chief’s hands.

  “All right,” he said. “It’s best we settle this right out. Then we can take up the matter of your independence.” His eyes held Donner’s for a long moment, then dropped to the papers on his desk. Weintraub motioned to Donner—it was time to retreat diplomatically.

  He threw an arm around Donner’s shoulders as they strolled out of the building into the sun. “Don’t worry about him,” he said expansively. “I won’t let him bother you no matter which way this goes.”

  Donner nodded unenthusiastically. “No matter which way this goes” sounded like thin support. They entered a canteen in the Defense Complex—the same place, he recalled with sad irony, that he and the new Chief had waited the night before the ‘73 war, each nursing his information like melting ice cream, hoping the Mossad would read it the way he did. Weintraub ordered tea and asked about England. Donner dragged him onto the subject of Hardin. The old terrorist kept talking away from it until Donner realized that he was embarrassed that the decision was out of his hands.

  “They won’t approve it, will they?”

  Weintraub shrugged. “Putting it to the Committee was the only way to go over his head. I’ve already talked with some of them. You’ve got a reasonable chance.”

  “How did he find out?”

  “He’s after you, looking for things.”

  “But not even my staff knows. Only my closest—”

  “I’d look out for your friend Grandig, if I were you.”

  “How do you—”

  Weintraub smiled. An hour later, a young Air Force officer came to the table with a telephone message. Weintraub was expected at the Prime Minister’s offices deep within the military compound.

  Weintraub bustled through the heavy security like an old lion oblivious to his half-grown cubs. “They’ll like you,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  The meeting room was dominated by a long table. The Ministers’ Committee for Security and Foreign Affairs were already seated. They were busy-looking men with tired eyes, lined jowls, and sagging mouths that turned down at the corners, as if their faces had been maimed by a thousand frustrations. Most wore the ubiquitous open-collared shirts and shapeless slacks of Israeli public life, and Donner felt like a stranger in his elegantly tailored tropical suit, and silk tie.

  He sat at one end of the table, his expression composed, while Weintraub introduced him in colorful terms. His mind seethed. He could see by the way they listened that Weintraub was the Committee’s resident character, their last touch with the old heroics. They heard little good news in these times of fragile peace, and nothing dramatic. There was in their tentative patience hope for a brief amusement.

  Gloomily, Donner recognized that his mentor had slipped unwittingly into obsolescence. He noted their quickened interest, however, when Weintraub referred to his British photographer cover, his London club memberships, his Curzon Street address; Donner had often experienced the love-hate feelings of former British colonials, and he knew how to use them to his advantage. They still harbored old memories of English snubs and felt somehow vindicated when offered the chance to hire a tame Englishman.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, standing, and speaking in his crispest tones. He thanked Weintraub and the Committee for their time, remarked how pleasant it was to visit Israel again, and then launched into his plan briefly and forcefully.

  “I propose a simple plan to counter terrorism by pressuring the governments that support terrorists. We shall support Jewish terrorists who attack targets of opportunity. The targets of opportunity will be the oil tankers that deliver Arabian crude to Europe.”

  Their eyes lighted. They could imagine how the oil producers would abandon the terrorists they were financing. And they could see how European nations that often let terrorists escape Israeli agents would clean out the cells and safe houses where attacks were plotted. He thought he had them convinced.

  Then doubt clouded their eyes. They exchanged uncomfortable glances; one of them took the easy way out. He asked the Chief what he thought of Donner’s idea.

  “Madness,” said the Chief. His bony mouth snapped shut and he waited until someone else asked him to expand upon his opinion. “Because our strongest allies, our best friends, are dependent upon that oil. Germany, Sweden, the Dutch, the United States. We can’t risk their anger. It would be like a hitchhiker stopping cars with land mines.”

  “Drech!” Weintraub said cheerfully, stepping in before they could laugh
at the Chief’s unexpected joke. “It is a brilliant idea. The threat alone will do it.”

  “You can’t threaten without doing it at least once,” replied the Chief.

  “Exactly,” said Weintraub. “That is what Miles has done. He’s set the wheels in motion for a very convincing demonstration.”

  “What have you done?” asked the Prime Minister, quieting the Mossad Chief with a quick gesture.

  Donner explained about Hardin.

  The Prime Minister listened expressionlessly. When Donner had finished, he turned to the Mossad Chief. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  “I only just learned it.”

  The Prime Minister turned to Donner. His horn-rimmed glasses usually hid his eyes. Now, looking straight at him, Donner was surprised by the fierceness in his ordinary face. He was looking at a fellow killer.

  “Do I understand that you created this plan on your own?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Weintraub interrupted. “I was kept posted on the progress, Mr. Prime Minister.”

  The Prime Minister spoke without taking his eyes from Donner. “But you are no longer active in the Mossad, Zwi. You are now a member of my cabinet with certain security duties that do not include espionage. Why did you not pass this information to the Mossad?”

  Weintraub looked pained. The Prime Minister didn’t wait for an answer. “For that matter, Donner, why didn’t you report to your superior?”

  Donner answered carefully. No one in the room looked amused anymore. “There was nothing to report yet. The man made all his own arrangements.”

  “But you procured his weapon.”

  “No. He got it himself. That’s how we discovered him, as I mentioned.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I offered to radio the location of the ship. He accepted my offer mainly to get rid of me.”

  “Does he know who you are?”

  “He guessed—it doesn’t matter. He’s fanatically devoted to sinking the ship. It’s all he cares about. He does not think of himself as working for Israel.”