Shah-Mak

by Alan Williams

  Packer thanked him, adding an ungracious epithet, and Ryderbeit cackled and waved goodbye. Packer watched the truck grind off into the night; he missed Ryderbeit, as much for his company as for his expertise with a gun.

  He and his English-speaking guide now began to walk back along the metalled road. The man seemed to be unarmed and carried only a hurricane lamp. Neither of them spoke. The silence and darkness were broken only by the soft scuffing of their boots and the distant flare of burning gas from the oil wells of Barzak, twenty miles north-east of the capital.

  After a few hundred yards the hurricane lamp picked out the dim silhouette of a Range Rover. As they reached it, Packer’s hands tightened instinctively round the MI6, which was still slung from his neck. His companion, who had a young clean-shaven face under a Castro-style forage cap, opened the door on the driver’s side, nodded to Packer to get in, then joined him in the passenger seat. The keys were in the ignition.

  ‘Start the engine, please,’ the young man said; ‘we do not have much time.’ He leaned over and switched on the lights. ‘You are familiar with the geography, yes?’

  Packer nodded and slipped into gear. During his stay outside Beirut, Pol had given him a map of Mamounia, extending to the outer suburbs, with one-way streets marked by arrows in red crayon. Pol had also provided photographs and postcards of certain buildings, squares, and monuments.

  Packer’s route was shown by a dotted green line which stopped at the corner of Passam Street, an intersection leading off the main avenue — a total distance of some 700 metres from the entrance to the Royal Palace. It was going to be a long, lonely walk for Sarah, Packer thought.

  The young man had told him to keep the headlamps dipped. The edges of the road were ill-defined, heaped with wind-blown sand that sometimes covered the whole road until the wheels of the car sank almost to the axles.

  Neither of them seemed disposed to talk. For the first few minutes the silence between them was tense; then the young man switched on the car radio and tuned in to the local station.

  Packer now noticed two curious things: instead of the mournful wail of traditional music, the radio was playing strident martial tunes; he also saw, beyond the white arc of the headlamps, that the glow of the city, which had been clearly visible from the air, had disappeared. He supposed that the citizens of Mamounia, deprived of alcohol and the diversions of Western life, retired early, and that, the street lighting was extinguished before midnight. But even as he thought of it, he was not entirely happy with this explanation.

  According to the map, it was twelve kilometres to the outskirts of the city. He had checked the kilometre gauge before leaving, and saw that they had covered just over half this distance, when they ran into a roadblock.

  Two jeeps and an armoured car were positioned along the road so that he would have to do a slalom to get past. Half a dozen soldiers in battle-dress and helmets stood on either side. They all looked efficient and alert. He slowed down and stopped, even before they had ordered him to. Several carbines and rifles were pointing at his head, and there was a finger on every trigger. The man beside him switched off the radio. ‘We must get out of here,’ he whispered. He sounded nervous.

  As Packer opened his door a sound reached him that he had not heard for a long time: a sound both fearful and exhilarating, sending at once a needle of excitement up his spine and making his heart race.

  It was the distant sound of battle: not just sporadic firing, but a steady grumble and roar, punctuated by the rattle of machine guns, the crack of mortars, and the slow thump of artillery.

  He looked at his guide, who stood white-faced in the light of more hurricane lamps beside the road. He was talking earnestly to one of the soldiers, who appeared to be an officer. Packer waited, without speaking. The young man finally turned and was about to speak, when the sky was split open by a streak of white-hot flame, followed by the tearing shriek of a jet. The troops ducked instinctively as the fighter swooped away towards the city.

  The guide turned to him again. ‘I do not understand. There is big fighting in the city.’

  ‘Can we go on?’ said Packer.

  ‘They say it is difficult. That the road is blocked and that it is very dangerous.’

  Christ, thought Packer. Those bastards, Pol and Steiner, had to choose this night of all nights! In normal circumstances he would have driven back and waited for Ryderbeit at the salt-pan. But he remembered that somewhere ahead, in the chaos of battle, was Sarah. He didn’t suppose that the Ruler would have much time for her tonight: the Royal Palace would be the central target of the fighting. He just hoped to hell that it had all started before she had been despatched on her mission.

  At least he had the consolation of knowing that Ryderbeit, going with the Fieseler Storch to refuel, would be taking a different road away from the city, and might even have an uneventful ride.

  He said, ‘Let’s get going.’ He moved back towards the Range Rover and no one stopped him. The guide got in beside him and Packer restarted the engine. ‘They didn’t even ask to see our papers,’ he added, nodding at the troops as he swung the Rover round between the jeeps.

  ‘They have instructions,’ the guide said uneasily. He switched on the radio again: the same monotonous martial music.

  ‘Have you any idea what’s happening?’ Packer asked.

  ‘No. But I think there are bad things. Maybe a revolution.’

  ‘Who makes the revolution?’ said Packer.

  ‘I do not know. Maybe NAZAK. There are many bad men in NAZAK. But maybe it is the army — and that is not so bad.’ He shook his head. ‘It is very complicated.’

  After another two miles the headlamps picked out the rear of a Chieftain tank, straddling the whole road. When Packer stopped and got out, he saw that it was the last of a column of six. One of the crew came round, wearing the padded leather helmet and earflaps of tank troops ready for combat. The guide had again begun talking in a rapid undertone, while Packer listened to the cacophony of gunfire ahead, which had grown perceptibly louder.

  The young man turned to him at last, with worried eyes. ‘It is not good. The army has surrounded the city and is fighting with NAZAK. It is impossible to go further.’

  Packer stared at him hopelessly. ‘I’ve got to be in the city in twenty minutes!’

  The guide shook his head. ‘It is not possible.’

  ‘We can bloody well try.’ Packer glared at the helmeted soldier. ‘Will he let us pass?’

  The guide shrugged, with a miserable defeated movement. ‘The road is blocked. Maybe when the tanks have gone —’ He shook his head and got back into the Range Rover. Packer followed reluctantly, with a sense of furious frustration.

  In less than twenty minutes now, Sarah might come running to the corner of Passam Street to find no one there. In the long year of knowing her, and loving her, this was his one chance to play a role of high drama and gallantry; and at the final moment he was going to fail her.

  CHAPTER 40

  Sarah found herself lying on a couch in the brightly lit anteroom. Her face still felt swollen and sore. Shifting her legs under the long evening dress, she realized, to her horror, that she had wet herself.

  She tried to sit up and found that her hands and feet were tied together with sash-cord. She was also aware that her nose was running, and that one of her eyelashes had come unstuck.

  All the men in the room were standing very still, listening. From somewhere outside came a loud, distinct sound which she had heard many times on films and television; but the reality of it was so alien to her that she thought at first she must be mistaken. It was heavy gunfire.

  The next moment, she knew there was no mistake. The floor rocked with a shuddering explosion, followed by the crash of glass; the lights dimmed, went out for a couple of seconds, then came on again. Half the men in the room had rushed through the outer door. Under the chandelier, clouds of dust were rising like smoke.

  The gunfire outside seemed to be coming cl
oser; quick chattering bursts, broken at steady intervals by a pulsating boom. Then another ear-cracking explosion, and the lights went out for good.

  The room was full of dust and shouts. Several torches flashed on, catching the confused shapes of faces, wild-eyed, open-mouthed, frantic with fear. A bulky figure paused beside her. ‘Little girl —’ Tamat’s hand fastened round her elbow — ‘don’t think your friends outside are going to help you.’ He was bending over her, and she caught the harsh smell of saffron on his breath.

  His fingers began to squeeze and pinch the flesh of her upper arm, while in his other hand he was holding something. In the uncertain light of the torches, it took her a few seconds to recognize the lipstick. Colonel Tamat followed her horrified gaze, and began to laugh.

  His voice was shut out by an explosion which seemed this time to come from within the room; the chandelier lurched and tinkled like sleigh bells, and Sarah felt fragments of plaster spraying over her face and hair. She began to cough from the dust. Colonel Tamat had released her arm, but went on speaking in the same silky voice.

  ‘I would like to have had more time to spend on you, but one is forced to bow to the winds of history. You came here to kill a man, so it is fitting that you should be despatched by the same method that you intended for your victim.’ As he spoke he rolled her quickly, expertly on to her stomach.

  She began to scream, as much with shame as terror. She tried, by pressing her knees into the couch, to prevent him from pulling up her dress; then she remembered that she had soiled herself, and became hysterical with humiliation. Her screams were carrying even above the sound of firing, when she felt a violent blow across her buttocks which stopped her breath in a gasp of pain.

  Tamat was talking to her all the while, but in his own guttural language now, as he ripped her dress up to her waist. She felt his big brown fingers at the base of her spine, gripping the elastic of her pants; there was a long volley of bullets, so close that she could hear the swish of air and the crump as they sank into the wall above her.

  Tamat had suddenly moved away, with two loping steps, and now stood swaying as though he were drunk. There was another bursting roar and she saw the front of his jacket flatten against his body. He stumbled, jerked his head up, did a quick two-step shuffle, fell over backwards, and lay still.

  Sarah was not sure whether she had fainted or not. At first the darkness and noise and confusion were so concentrated as to be totally unreal: she was overcome by that detached, timeless sensation which she had experienced once after she had fallen while hunting.

  The cords round her hands and feet had been cut, her dress had been pulled down, and someone had sat her up like a doll on the couch, and put a handkerchief into her hand. Her immediate concern, besides the pain in her buttocks and the embarrassment over her loose eyelash, was whether she had stained her dress.

  There were more lights in the room, and more men, but they were different from the ones before. They wore combat uniforms and their rubber-soled boots made no sound on the polished floor. Several of the plain-clothes men were lying in odd lifeless positions along the wall, their bodies ash-white with dust and plaster.

  A group of men came through the folding doors from the bedroom. The gunfire outside had slackened to spasmodic bursts. Sarah became aware of a hush in the room.

  A man had come through the small outer door. He was wearing an olive-green smock shirt and carried a pistol. He looked slowly round the room, then at Sarah, and nodded. She stared blankly at him, as he came strolling towards her.

  He stopped next to the couch, his pistol pointing at the floor. ‘You have been exceptionally lucky, my dear Sarah. For my part, I must apologize for these rather dramatic events, but they were unforeseen.’

  ‘What has happened?’ she pleaded, in an exhausted voice.

  ‘There has been a change of government,’ Shiva Steiner replied. ‘What is called a coup d’état. To be exact, it has been a coup within a coup. Certain mischievous elements within the Secret Police managed to subvert units of the army, and with the backing of the Pan-Islamic Socialists, tried to take over the country. Fortunately, the rest of the Armed Forces acted in time to forestall disaster.’

  ‘But the Ruler?’ she cried.

  ‘The Ruler?’ Steiner sighed, with a glance at the closed bedroom doors. ‘It is a matter of little importance who really killed him — you, or the head of the Secret Police. The fact is, he is dead, and over his corpse a new government will be formed. However —’ his eyes were now fixed on a point just above Sarah’s shoulder — ‘when I say it does not matter who killed him, I do not mean that it is not important for the people of this country — and the outside world — to be told who killed him.

  ‘You must understand that many millions of his subjects — simple, illiterate people who know no better — believe their Ruler to be a divine power. They fear him, but they love him. And it would be very bad for the morale of the nation if it were learned that the Chief of NAZAK, which was the Ruler’s right arm, had turned and slaughtered his master. Therefore it is necessary to find — what is called in English, I think — a scapegoat.’

  She felt a cold creeping terror from the bowels up to the nape of her neck. ‘Me?’

  Shiva Steiner’s mouth creased into a saurian grin. ‘Considering the amount of money you have been paid for tonight, for doing absolutely nothing, I think it both apt and convenient that you should take both the credit and the blame.’

  ‘Blame?’

  ‘Why not? You agreed to commit murder. In most countries, including your own, that is a crime in itself.’

  ‘You can’t kill me!’

  ‘Of course not, my dear. When the fighting has stopped, you will escape. Your arrest and trial would only lead to embarrassing complications with your country’s government at a time when our new regime will need to be on the best terms with all the Western nations.’

  He turned to go. She leaned out, with a puzzled, frightened gesture, as though to grab his sleeve. ‘Shiva, please!’ Her voice became a weak shout. ‘How do I escape?’

  ‘My dear, do not be foolish. We have discussed the plan in detail. If he has done as instructed, your friend Capitaine Packer will be waiting for you at the corner of Passam Street. It will take you no more than ten minutes to walk.’

  ‘But I was supposed to be there at midnight!’ She glanced frantically at her watch: it was 1.10. ‘And if I wait until the fighting’s over, I’m going to be hours late.’

  ‘My dear, you are not the only one whose plans have been disturbed by the events of tonight. Your friend has no doubt been held up himself by the fighting. However, if he fails to reach his rendezvous, then that is simply a misfortune with which I cannot help you. In the meantime, one of my officers will take you to a private apartment where you can make yourself comfortable until it is safe for you to leave.’

  CHAPTER 41

  Packer had tried rolling down the Range Rover windows, but it did nothing to relieve the heat, and only brought with it the smell: a burnt bitter-sweet smell of cordite and shell-smoke, scorched stone and dust, and the clammy foetid stench of roasted flesh.

  It was not until past nine in the morning that he had been let through the roadblocks outside the city, and then only after protracted conversations on field telephones. He had reached the commercial centre of the city shortly after ten. The streets were lifeless, deserted. Trucks, jeeps, and armoured cars stood crashed, abandoned, burnt out, amid the litter of human debris on which the flies were already settling in glistening swarms. It looked like some obscene playground.

  Near the corner of Passam Street, a couple of personnel carriers stood locked together in a tangle of crushed, blackened steel, their wheels burned to the rim, their crews scattered along the sidewalk — a row of tiny charred figures lying on their backs with their arms and legs drawn up in the air, their bones sprouting like bamboo shoots from the cobweb ashes of their uniforms, teeth grinning at the sky. One of them had escaped the flames
and lay further up the street, a coil of silvery intestine wound out beside him, still steaming in the heat, while two bald dogs were already setting to with their fangs.

  Packer backed up the street, far enough to be out of sniper range from any of the buildings leading to the Palace Square. He took a tepid drink from the plastic canteen, rinsed out his mouth, opened the door and spat into the street, where the water bubbled and shrank into a dusty gob and disappeared.

  The heat was so intense that he was having to breathe slowly, between panting gasps, like an asthmatic. Through the aching glare the city had a bleached naked look, with every window smashed, as dark as empty eye sockets, walls blistered and blasted, balconies hanging down like broken jaws. Behind, the minarets rose in shimmering clusters — gold and pink tulips thrusting their way up from the scrap-heap.

  He leaned against the wheel, the plastic cover slimy under his fingers, the sweat stinging his eyes, itching down the backs of his legs. For twenty minutes nothing happened. Nothing at all, except the ghastly canine meal behind him. He wanted to get out and put an end to the creatures with the MI6 which still lay under the seat; but he feared that the least sound of gunfire would at once arouse the city to further fury. For the moment it was as though Mamounia had been stunned.

  Packer now felt a new, strange sense of unease — something that was oddly at variance with the untimely chaos of the night. He was still uncertain of exactly what had happened, except that his final passage had been remarkably, uncannily smooth. Even at the four roadblocks in the centre of the city, which had been manned by hard, battle-weary troops, there had always been an officer ready to check his credentials on a telephone or radio, and to let him through.

  His brain felt clogged and swollen with the heat; but one thought persisted: a trap, if it is to be effective, has to be well-oiled. He thought of Pol and Steiner and Dr Zak; he trusted none of them — probably no more than they trusted him — and remembered, that his only insurance was his joint account for three-quarters of a million pounds with Pol.