by Dennis Lynds
“That’s right,” Hareet said to the first man. “You’ve been to Santa Barbara?”
“If you will ask your wife—” the first man began.
Greta appeared silently in the open door from the hall. The man at the door heard her soft step, turned. She stabbed him twice in the heart before he could move or even open his mouth.
Hareet’s knife appeared in his hand. The first man only managed to half draw his pistol. Hareet killed him with a single thrust.
Greta closed the door. They dragged the bodies into the bedroom and pushed them into a closet, moved the furniture just enough to cover the bloodstains on the carpeting. They changed into Arab clothes and left the room. They took nothing with them but their weapons and their second set of papers. They took the back stairs down.
Before they left, Hareet broke the mirror of the dressing table in the bedroom.
* * *
In the noisy streets, they mingled with the crowd. As they walked through the packed throngs of the enemy capital, Greta held Hareet’s hand once. Her veil hid her face. Then they separated and she walked behind him until they reached the dark and deserted streets in the slums of the city where the fellahin wallowed in filth and misery.
On a particularly dark and silent street they went down four steps into a dank cellar where water ran in a deep trough at one side of the room. Slime floated on the water and rats swam in the slime. Hareet haggled with a one-eyed Arab in ragged Western clothes and a stained fez. Money changed hands. Hareet and Greta found a deserted corner of the cellar. They lay down to sleep as much as they could.
“How long do we have?” Greta said.
“As long as we’ve always had, Greta. Two more days.”
They spoke softly in stilted Arabic. Water spouted in ragged streams from pipes in the walls, human waste reeked through the darkness. The people lay in stuporous sleep, or sat against the walls and stared at the poverty and need and squalor of their lives. No one cared about Greta and Hareet in the darkness and silence of the cellar, no one was suspicious. Patriotism does not run deep among the ragged and starving and diseased of any country, not even here where patriotism was often all they had to make them feel human.
“They have no way to trace us,” Hareet said. “The Rogerses are gone for good. They know that two spies are in the city, but they expected there would be spies anyway. Our problem is still the same—to get the data. The only change is that it will be a little harder to get it back and in time.”
“There’s another change, Paul,” Greta said. “We don’t have a bed for tonight.”
“No,” Hareet said. “I’m sorry, liebchen.”
Greta smiled at the endearment that was far from his stilted Arabic. “I’m sorrier,” she said, and lay close against him in the dimness. “Where will we live when we retire, when this is over?”
Hareet stroked her arm softly. “There’s a hill in the north. It looks out over orange trees and an olive grove. You can see the border. I own it, and when I can look at that border and know that no danger will ever come across it again, then we will build a stone house and live in it.”
They slept for a time, took turns on watch. Greta was awake when the ragged peddler sidled up to them like an apparition from the slimy water of the cellar itself. She touched Hareet, who opened his eyes but did not move.
“The mirror could be mended,” the peddler whispered in English.
Hareet took his hand from the pistol under his ragged robes. Greta slipped her knife back up her voluminous sleeve.
“We had to kill two,” Hareet said.
“They were found. Fortunately, I had seen the mirror five minutes before. What is your assignment?”
“The ammunition dumps, supply depots, fuel centers.”
“Impossible. The maps and information are in General Staff Headquarters,” the peddler said.
“I can get in,” Hareet said.
“But not out, Captain. No way you can get out. Not with the data in usable form.”
“Why?” Greta asked.
The filthy peddler sat against the wet stone walls, seemed to close his eyes and go to sleep. “Because our Arab friends have become modern, Lieutenant. At least at General Staff Headquarters. The documents will have been chemically treated so that no one can touch them undetected, or film them undetected. A sophisticated touch supplied by their friends in the bigger nations. Also, to get out you must pass two ranks of guards and locked gates, and a bank of detectors that detect film or the documents themselves.”
“So if we steal them, they would know at once and change the locations.”
“If you got them out, the present locations would be changed as fast as they could do it. Perhaps a short delay in their plans, and no help to us.”
“And we could only make the attempt once,” Greta said.
“No matter how many attempts we made, the data is useful to us only as long as they do not know we have it,” Hareet said. “It must be taken and sent to our forces undetected.”
“And that can’t be done, Captain,” the peddler said. “We’ll have to beat them head to head, no matter how bad that looks.”
“Everything can be done in some way,” Hareet said, and sat for a time in the raw stench of the cellar filled only with the sound of running and dripping water. “Our man inside General Staff Headquarters is still there at his job?”
“Yes.” The peddler nodded. “But there is no way—”
“The main building with the information we need is inside a courtyard?”
“Yes. And there is a locked gate in the outer wall of the courtyard.”
“Where are the detectors?”
“At the door of the building.”
“How is the security inside the building in the day and the night?”
“In the day, fairly tight. At night, poor. They rely on the wall and outer gates and perimeter guards. The guards inside make rounds but don’t go into the offices. The staff officers don’t trust the soldiers with keys to the offices. That’s their weakness.”
“And we’ll use it,” Hareet said.
“Can we go in together, Paul?” Greta said.
“Of course not,” Hareet said simply. Then he smiled at her. “But perhaps we can find some private place later tonight. A place for us to sleep.”
She smiled in return. “Tonight, then.”
Hareet and the peddler lay down on the stone. Greta sat up, watching. Hareet and the peddler talked for a long time. It was well past midnight when the peddler left alone. Hareet and Greta pretended to sleep for another hour, then slipped out of the dank cellar together.
“Our peddler gave me another address,” Hareet said. “Somewhere we can be alone. It’s not far.”
They both knew the danger of such a move, every moment on the streets brought the possibility of being stopped, observed, making a mistake. Every new place exposed them to more contacts, more unexpected events. But they both also knew the risks of tomorrow.
The place turned out to be a small room on the second floor above a dark bookshop owned by an old Coptic Christian widow with patriotic slogans in her window. The peddler himself let them in, had a room of his own on the first floor where he had lived for over a year.
“It’s as safe as anything can be here,” the peddler said, and left them alone in the tiny room with its one bed and some chairs and a cabinet they could barely see. There was no light.
They didn’t need a light. After they had made love once more, Hareet held her close against him for the rest of the night as if to build a wall of protection that would keep her safe. He was not a demonstrative man; Greta knew he was afraid for what could happen to her, to them, when the night ended.
* * *
The guards paced at the gates in the outer wall of Army General Staff Headquarters far out on the edge of the city. They looked up as they walked their posts to watch their jets fly high above in beautiful formation. The ragged people on the streets cheered the jets and the guards as the
y shuffled past the front gates.
Among the throngs of people that passed the gates was a tall, dark-skinned man with a pointed beard, thick glasses and a fez. He walked purposefully, with an arrogant bearing. With the tasseled fez he wore a dark Western suit and immaculate pale kid gloves. The crowds of fellahin gave him respectful room as he strode around and through them.
Hareet, in the dark makeup and wearing the gloves to conceal his missing finger, turned into a side street at the corner of the wall and proceeded on his inspection of the headquarters building. The side wall was broken by only another high wooden gate, locked on the inside and outside. In the rear, the wall stretched without a break, and on the fourth side there was only a narrow, barred gate, also locked on the inside and outside and patrolled by a guard.
The building inside the high stone wall was from the last century and only two stories high. The roof had a steep pitch, and the windows of the upper floor were barred and shuttered. Two armored cars slowly patrolled the street all around the building, moving in opposite directions.
Hareet, his study completed, walked to a house a few blocks from the headquarters, and there changed into the flowing and ragged burnoose of an Arab country. He removed the fez and glasses, replaced the fez with a keffiyeh, and rearranged his false beard. He strapped his left arm to his side, and assumed a limp in his left leg.
* * *
A crippled fellahin was too common a sight in the streets of the city for anyone to look at twice. The fellahin limped his way to a filthy alley that paralleled the street in front of staff headquarters, and entered the rear of a building. He climbed to the second floor and slipped into an empty room at the front. He locked the door behind him, crossed quickly and without a limp to the front window with its clear view of the guarded gate into the headquarters.
Hareet sat in a chair some three feet inside the window so that no sun would glint on the powerful binoculars he took from beneath his burnoose. He sat on the chair for six hours without moving, except to rest his eyes now and then, and to light a cigarette. He scrutinized the building, and the officers who went in and out.
Late in the afternoon, a slight scratching came at the door of the room. Hareet listened from his chair. The scratching was repeated in a definite pattern. He opened the door. The peddler came in.
“Have you found your man, Captain?”
“A colonel of artillery,” Hareet said. “He looks enough like me to pass. He’s in there right now. He is arrogant, the soldiers do not seem to like him, and he drives himself. His vehicle indicates that he is a field commander, not a staff officer. He is unusually tall, has slightly Sudanese features, wears a monocle and strides much as I do. He also wears gloves. He carries a swagger stick and is annoyed at having to present credentials every time he goes in or out of the front gate. When does the guard change?”
“In an hour.”
“Where are all the supply, fuel and ammunition depot documents we need?”
“In a small vault. It’s an old key-locked type left by the British. With all other precautions supplied by their more modern friends, they don’t feel a need to spend what a new vault would cost. It won’t be hard to open, and it’s located in a file room connected to the office of the chief of supply. They may work around the clock tonight.”
“No, not an Arab army. They will be in conferences or with their mistresses. Come.”
Hareet and the peddler left the room, and went down to the alley. Greta stood in the shadows of the alley dressed as a street boy.
Hareet described the colonel of artillery. “Watch for him. If he comes out, don’t lose him.”
Hareet and the peddler returned to the building a few blocks away where Hareet had changed from the gentleman in the fez to the crippled fellahin. There the peddler opened a large dossier, and Hareet found the picture and official history and designations of the artillery colonel he had seen go in and out the main gate of General Staff Headquarters.
The peddler read the details. “Colonel Aziz Ramdi. Forty-two years old. Unmarried. Sudanese mother. No foreign posts or training, no staff time, but many commendations for bravery in the last war with us. Commander of the Hundred and Twelfth Field Artillery. They’re part of the city defense. Only recently transferred to the city from service on the southern border. He hasn’t had the plum positions, doesn’t sound like he’s made any good connections. Probably because of that Sudanese mother. Hard to say how well-known he could be at staff headquarters.”
“I won’t need long,” Hareet said. “It’s reasonable to assume that a line officer who’s been out in the field and far from the capital won’t be all that familiar to the staff here. He’s my best chance, we don’t have a lot more time.”
The peddler nodded, and with the picture of the artillery colonel in front of him, Hareet worked on his face until he looked as much like Colonel Aziz Ramdi of the Hundred and Twelfth Field Artillery as he could.
“The film could be shot over the wall from a top window,” the peddler said. “I have the equipment.”
“They would know,” Hareet said.
“You could copy and not photograph, then the light would not sensitize the chemicals on the documents.”
“There would not be time. I would have to touch the papers. The data must be secured without their knowing that we have it,” Hareet emphasized.
Hareet completed his disguise. With the peddler shuffling far enough ahead of him that they could not be considered in any way together, he walked back to the alley and the room across from the headquarters. It had grown dark in the city, and large floodlights illuminated the headquarters wall and building.
“He is still inside,” Greta said from the shadows of the alley.
An hour later, the colonel of artillery came out, got into his Jeep and impatiently presented his credentials at the front gate. He drove off to the left and made a right turn onto a narrow street that was the direct route to his unit.
A fellahin woman dashed out of the shadows directly into the path of his Jeep. A ragged peddler pursued her. The peddler caught the woman in the street in front of the colonel’s Jeep, struggled with her amid a torrent of loud screams and curses. Ramdi jammed on his brakes, and added his own curses to the loud Arabic.
The colonel barely felt his Jeep sway as someone jumped into it behind him. His pistol was still under its flap when the thin cord tightened around his throat.
* * *
Colonel Aziz Ramdi glared angrily at the officer of the guard at the gate into headquarters. The officer of the guard was nervous as he inspected the colonel’s credentials. Only fifteen minutes ago he had checked the colonel out, and he felt ridiculous going through the entire routine again, but he knew he would have been even more nervous if he hadn’t. In an Arab army, independent thought and decisions are not encouraged. Another weakness Hareet had exploited before.
The colonel made no explanation for his sudden return, sat in stony silence through the entire careful process. But his arrogant eyes bored through the junior officer with the clear implication that the colonel would remember this insult. The status of recognition is also part of an army too rigid with class and privilege.
“A thousand pardons, Colonel,” the officer of the guard said, and returned the credentials with a smart salute.
Hareet drove on into the courtyard without even returning the salute. The junior officer swore under his breath at the back of the arrogant colonel.
Hareet parked his Jeep as close to the main entrance of the headquarters building as he could—a senior officer does not walk far. He jumped out as if impatient to get to some important task, strode rapidly to the entrance. Two majors reached the entrance a hair before he did—which he had arranged by slowing his pace. The majors both stopped and deferred to him. He waved them ahead with an impatient gesture of his swagger stick: asserting his rank, showing democratic largesse and distracting the guard at the front door.
The two majors hurried on into the building so as
to not keep the colonel waiting. Not much more than an inch behind them, Hareet merely flashed his credentials to the guard. The guard, hurried by three credentials almost together, and the need to give three fast salutes, barely glanced at the tall colonel’s identification.
Hareet was inside the building.
The long corridors were dim, cool and high-vaulted. Hareet strode loudly along the corridors until he located the office of the chief of supply. There was light under the door and the low sound of steady activity inside. As the peddler had predicted, the office of the chief of supply was working long and late this night.
Hareet walked into a lounge for officers only. He entered, went into the lavatory, and then into a booth. Inside the booth, he removed all his makeup. He changed his rank to major. He changed his insignia to that of an artillery unit stationed far to the south. He tore all the credentials of Colonel Aziz Ramdi into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet, removed the credentials for a major of a tank unit in the south from a thin pouch under his clothes. He flushed the pieces of the pouch. He remained in the lounge for an hour, absorbed in reading some important report.
Each hour, he walked back to check the office of the chief of supply. Twice, he went into the officers’ dayroom and read a magazine. He drank the thick Turkish coffee the orderly served. In his normal appearance, there would be no one who could know him, as far as the peddler knew there were no officers from the distant artillery unit in the capital at this time, all field units being on twenty-four-hour alert.
At midnight, the office of the chief of supply was as dark and silent as all the other offices. As Hareet had been sure they would, all the officers from the chief of staff on down had gone to rest or party. Tomorrow would be a great day, tonight the building was quiet. Only the guards moved in the corridors of the headquarters.
Hareet waited until a guard had made his rounds of the corridor outside the office of the chief of supply. The corridor silent and empty, Hareet opened the door of the office with a picklock, slipped inside, his knife ready on the remote chance someone had been left behind, perhaps asleep.
No one had.
