Desert Fire

by David Hagberg

  She closed her eyes tight. What was she doing here?

  Someone was coming down the stairs at the far end of the corridor. A lot of people!

  Leila hurried back into the pump room, where she ducked behind some machinery. From where she crouched she could see the doorway, the decontamination chamber and the open pipeline as the first of the hostages came around the corner.

  77

  JACOB WADUD PAUSED on the narrow catwalk in the maintenance space between the second and third floors. Below, through the grilles enclosing the built-in light fixtures, he could see the blue glow of the containment pool. The control room was another ten meters away.

  He had been sent here to bring the general home alive. But now he felt like an assassin, stalking the man he had once proudly served.

  He crawled forward a few meters so that he was directly above one of the fluorescent lights. From there he could look down onto most of the reactor room floor.

  Hani Bouchiki, in the dead soldier’s uniform, stood at the stairs. Faulkner’s two demolitions people were crouched behind some equipment. They had radioed that the situation was impossible. So why didn’t they get the hell out of there?

  Wadud spotted the reason. One of the general’s soldiers stood in the shadows beneath the stairs that led up to the control room. He must have just come down. If the light hadn’t been so dim, he would surely have recognized Bouchiki as an impostor. But there was little doubt that he would spot Faulkner’s men if they tried to move.

  From this angle, Wadud did not have a clear view of the control room windows. If someone was there, he would not be able to see the soldier below the stairs.

  Wadud raised his gun and sighted the soldier. It would be a difficult shot. And the noise would alert anyone in the control room.

  He could not risk it.

  Something slammed into the back of his head, knocking him on his face. He fumbled with the PPK’s safety catch as someone pulled him over on his back.

  There were two soldiers dressed in battle fatigues. Wadud raised the automatic and fired twice, the first bullet catching the nearest soldier high in the chest, the second destroying the man’s face.

  The soldier reared backward into the second man, giving Wadud just enough time to get to one knee. He found himself looking into the barrel of a Kalashnikov, and he knew he was going to die.

  He never heard the burst from the Russian assault rifle, but his body was blasted back over the catwalk’s rail. He crashed through the thin acoustical tile of the ceiling and plunged into the pool.

  78

  SALMAN AND THE hostages were in the decontamination chamber, suiting up. It was taking too much time. Leila started to edge away from her hiding place when shots were fired.

  She started across the pump room. Salman, half dressed in a radiation suit, appeared at the decontamination chamber doorway. “What are you doing here?”

  “There were shots, Abdul. Where are Roemer and Wadud?”

  “Upstairs,” Salman said. “In the false ceiling above the control room.”

  “What about the explosives?”

  “Can’t do anything about them Hani is at the head of the stairs. Faulkner’s demolitions people are on the reactor floor.”

  Leila’s walkie-talkie clicked. Roemer came on. “We’re all clear. Are you in position, Jacob?”

  Leila started to raise her walkie-talkie but Salman motioned her to hold off. It wasn’t possible Roemer could have missed hearing the gunfire. What was he up to?

  “It’s all clear,” Roemer radioed again. “Are you in position, Jacob?”

  “Jacob Wadud is dead,” General Sherif’s voice came from the walkie-talkie.

  “Oh, God,” Leila cried. “Get those people out of here now!”

  “I want you here in the control room, Roemer,” Sherif radioed. “Now.”

  Leila ran down the corridor to the stairwell.

  “Roemer, in sixty seconds I blow the containment pool.”

  Leila took the stairs two at a time. Jacob Wadud was in the ceiling crawl space above the control room. Or at least he had been. Her father’s troops had apparently positioned themselves up there to watch for an attack. Wadud was dead.

  “Roemer!” General Sherif shouted.

  79

  ROEMER KEYED HIS walkie-talkie. “What do you want, General?” He needed time. It would take Salman and the hostages at least an hour to make their way through the pipeline and down the hill to safety.

  “I want you.” Sherif’s voice was calm.

  The elevator car was already on this floor.

  “Are you going to kill me, General, is that what you want? Just like you killed all those others in Munich and Hama and South Yemen?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You have fifty seconds, Roemer.”

  “Can you tell us why you did this … Michael?”

  “You’re insane, Roemer. Less than forty seconds.”

  “Do Colonel Habash and your soldiers know that you are the international terrorist called Michael? That you kill indiscriminately? Jews, Arabs, Muslims, infidels?”

  A figure appeared in the cafeteria doorway. Roemer raised the nine-millimeter and snapped off a shot as he jumped into the elevator.

  “Don’t kill him,” Sherif radioed. “Not yet.”

  Roemer punched the button for the pool floor. They needed just a little while longer. Whalpol, monitoring this channel, knew what was going on. He’d be speeding up the evacuation to minimize casualties in case this place went up. Roemer hoped Rudi had found Leila and gotten her out of harm’s way.

  “We’re still counting,” General Sherif radioed.

  Roemer raised his walkie-talkie. “I’m on my way down, General. I’d like to hear your explanation.”

  If he could lure Sherif out into the open, and kill him, the general’s troops might listen to reason.

  Roemer pocketed his gun as the elevator stopped on the containment pool floor and the doors came slowly open.

  A ragged hole had been torn in the ceiling; ripped wires hung down. Directly across from the elevator, less than five meters away, Menzel and Brecht were crouched behind a computer console. Bouchiki stood at the head of the stairs to the left, and across from the pool one of General Sherif’s soldiers stepped out from beneath the stairs. He motioned for Roemer to come out of the elevator and move toward the pool.

  Roemer stepped out slowly. He walked directly to the console so that he could look out across the dormant pool.

  “This way, Roemer,” the soldier called, his voice echoing.

  Jacob Wadud’s body floated facedown in the pool.

  “I want to talk to General Sherif.”

  “Oh, you will, Investigator. You will.”

  General Sherif appeared at the control room window above.

  “Sherif!” Roemer shouted. “General Sherif!”

  Sherif stepped out onto the walkway at the head of the stairs. Colonel Habash and two soldiers came with him, their Kalashnikovs trained on Roemer.

  “How did you get into the building?” General Sherif called down. “It was quite clever of you.”

  “Do you know why I am here?” Roemer shouted. “Do your men know why I have come?”

  General Sherif said nothing.

  “To arrest you for the murders of Sarah Razmarah and Joan Waldmann.”

  “Who would believe the son of a Nazi? Would you like to know what we have done to your father’s body?”

  “Have you told them, General, how you killed and raped those two young women?”

  General Sherif started down the stairs.

  “Have you told them how you raped one of the girls after she was dead?”

  Sherif reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped. He was smiling, still perfectly in control. He pulled out his pistol.

  “So the terrorist will strike again,” Roemer growled. “Saddam Hussein will be proud of you. You have ruined all of this for him.”

  General Sherif pointed his
pistol at Roemer’s head.

  “Kill me, General, but first tell me the truth.”

  Roemer figured the detonator was up in the control room.

  “I told our president that Germany could not be trusted,” Sherif said. “Not while you are in bed with the Americans. You have become worse than the Jews.”

  “I meant the truth about Sharazad Razmarah and Joan Waldmann. They did nothing to you, General. Nothing to harm Iraq. Why did you kill them?”

  Sherif stiffened.

  “They were nothing,” he said in a reasonable tone. “They were whores. They deserved to die.”

  Colonel Habash flinched. The other two soldiers, halfway down the stairs, looked at their general in disbelief.

  “Was it because they reminded you of your wife, or your mother?” Roemer asked.

  General Sherif’s face flushed. “They were both whores. Strumpets.”

  “But the Israelis killed them.”

  “I should have done it. I should have taken them to the desert and … taught them.”

  Roemer shook his head. “But it wasn’t that way at all, General. Why else did you assassinate those people in Tel Aviv in 1957 except for revenge?”

  80

  LEILA OPENED THE third-floor door and looked into the empty corridor. Access to the control room ceiling was through the drafting room floor. She’d seen that from Trautman’s notations on the engineering blueprints in Administration.

  Wadud had come this way. But he was dead. She’d heard every bit of it on the walkie-talkie. Death was all around, just like Beirut.

  The drafting room was deserted. Two floor panels had been removed.

  She went to the opening and got down on her stomach so that she could look all the way along the catwalk toward the control room.

  There was someone down there, his back to her, his figure outlined against the blue glow from a jagged hole in the ceiling below, right over the reactor pool.

  Leila eased herself onto the catwalk and started toward the crouching figure ahead. She could hear someone talking somewhere below. She stopped. It was her father and Roemer.

  “The truth,” Roemer said.

  “Time to die,” her father replied.

  “No,” Leila cried.

  The soldier on the catwalk spun around, his Kalashnikov coming up. Leila fired three shots, the third catching the soldier in his right side.

  The man cried out in pain, toppled over the rail and crashed through the ceiling into the pool.

  Leila raced forward. “Father!” she screamed. “Father!”

  81

  LEILA’S VOICE FROM above echoed through the fuel rod room. Everyone looked up. Roemer pulled Jacob Wadud’s gun out of his pocket and ducked off into the shadows.

  The room erupted in a volley of shots, automatic weapon fire ricocheting off the concrete floor at Roemer’s heels.

  He dove behind a large steel cabinet.

  Colonel Habash lay wounded at the foot of the stairs, and at least two of the Iraqi soldiers went down, but Sherif ran back up the stairs while Menzel fired at him from across the pool.

  The soldier who had been beneath the stairs ran across Roemer’s field of fire. Roemer squeezed off a shot. The soldier pitched forward on his face.

  “Sherif!” Roemer shouted.

  General Sherif fired from the top of the stairs; Menzel grunted and fell back. Bouchiki was gone from the head of the stairs, and Brecht, who had been beside Menzel, was nowhere to be seen. He’d probably been hit.

  Sherif darted into the control room.

  The detonator! Christ, the man was going to push the button!

  Roemer dashed for the stairs as he popped out the spent magazine and rammed the fresh one onto the butt.

  He flew up the stairs. At the top he crouched low and looked inside. Two soldiers were backed against a control panel. General Sherif, holding a small electronic device with a short antenna, stood in the middle of the room looking up at the ceiling.

  82

  LEILA WAS SHAKING, trying to hold her gun steady. She looked down through a light fixture into her father’s eyes.

  “Please, Father, don’t do it.”

  General Sherif’s eyes were wide, his nostrils flared, his face red.

  “It’s over, Father. The hostages are gone, most of your good soldiers are down, your position is untenable. There is no reason to continue. Let’s go home. It will be okay.”

  “Leila?” he said softly. He could not see her.

  Tears streamed down Leila’s cheeks. “Father, please.”

  “They have to die,” General Sherif said. “For what they did to us.”

  “They did nothing to us.” Leila started to squeeze the trigger when one of the soldiers by the control room panel fired his Kalashnikov, the burst catching the general across his chest, knocking him back over a desk, blood spraying everywhere, the detonator falling to the floor.

  No one moved. Roemer crouched outside the control room on the stairs. Leila stared at her father’s body. Both the soldiers gaped at their general. Finally the young soldier who had fired dropped his gun, sank to his knees and wept silently.

  83

  IF CHANCELLOR KOHL had not personally asked him to remain with the BKA, Walther Roemer would have made good his promise to himself to resign. He didn’t give a damn about the citation, about the BND’s thanks, about the congratulations from Colonel Legler or the approbations from Chief Prosecutor Schaller and Ludwig Whalpol.

  “What matters, Investigator,” the Chancellor said, “is that we need you. Germany needs you.”

  Need, Roemer thought. Who needs whom? Who belongs? For what purpose?

  It was late, nearly ten, on a miserably cold, windy evening when Roemer left the Chancellor’s residence on the Adenauerallee, climbed into his car and drove off.

  He wore a tuxedo. He reached up and undid the bow tie and top button of his shirt, then lit a cigarette as he crossed the Konrad Adenauer Bridge over the cold, dark Rhine.

  Three weeks had passed since the incident at the KwU plant. Incredibly, no outsiders had monitored the final walkie-talkie communications from the R&D building, a stroke of good fortune for them all. The media had been ruthlessly kept from learning the true extent of the threat. All they knew was that terrorists had taken over the R&D facility and had been stopped by a heroic BKA investigator.

  The bodies of General Sherif and his soldiers had been removed in secret and flown back to Baghdad that very night. A brief press notice had announced the general’s death a few days later, of heart failure in his home outside the capital. In the next days, Iraqi newspapers and television were filled with accounts of his bravery and the good deeds he had done for his country. Iraq still had its hero.

  Over the past weeks Roemer had refrained from much thinking, but in the most recent days the loneliness had begun to catch up with him. The harsh reality was that no one really cared about him other than Rudi Gehrman and his wife.

  Worrying about his father had occupied so much of his emotional energy that now a large hole was left behind.

  Roemer had come to realize that his youth had been spent in the pursuit of survival, which left him in several ways stunted emotionally, incapable of trust.

  Kata and Gretchen had not simply tired of him, they had been driven off by his aloofness, by his insensitive detachment.

  Chancellor Kohl was correct: Roemer was a damned good cop. But there was this large lack in his personality: the ability to trust people who cared about him.

  He turned off the bridge, but instead of heading up the busy Hauptstrasse to his apartment in the Oberkassel, he doubled back across the TEE tracks to the extension of the Rheinallee—the river drive. He parked his car below the bridge abutments, doused the lights and got out.

  In the reflection of the city lights he could see the swift flow of the black water. For a second or two he had the bleak urge to climb over the retaining wall and leap down into the dark river and let it carry his body to the sea. It w
ould be peaceful, free of loneliness.

  There was an old peasant proverb: Life is unbearable, but death is not so pleasant either. He couldn’t remember where he had heard it, but he suspected it was from his mother.

  Headlights flashed across his car, and then him, as a Mercedes entered the parking area and pulled up. Someone got out.

  Roemer stepped away from the retaining wall as the slight figure approached. Suddenly he didn’t give a damn about the circumstances, the reasons, the motivations. He simply felt the chance that he might no longer be alone. There was still time to learn to trust.

  “Walther,” Leila Kahled said softly.

  “I hoped you’d find me,” he said.

  84

  ALL THE GERMAN engineers were gone and would not return. Saddam Hussein stood on a high balcony looking out across what was the greatest secret ever to be contained in this valley. Even greater, he thought, than the creation of mankind.

  Muhammad had spoken of the Garden of Eden. It would happen again. Here in Iraq, in the Fertile Crescent.

  Four hundred meters above, on the desert floor, work continued on the massive desalinization facility, but here, in the natural salt caverns formed millions of years ago, the real project—Iraq’s real salvation—languished.

  “But only for the moment, Mr. President,” the man standing beside Hussein said.

  “Your technology is not so good as the Germans’, is this not so?” Hussein asked.

  “We have more nuclear fuel,” Nikolai Vasilevich Rogachev said. “President Nikolayev’s new SALT proposal will mean that even more nuclear warheads will have to be dismantled. Plutonium makes a wonderful electrical generating fuel.” The Russian grinned. “Did you know, Mr. President, that one half of a kilogram of fissioned plutonium is equal to ten billion watts of thermal energy?”

  “That is interesting,” the Iraqi leader answered. “But tell me again about the financial arrangements and your security proposals.”