The Big Book of Espionage
Page 115
“Captain, observe my directions.”
The officer drew his sword, and, fixing his eyes upon the prisoner, pointed silently to the opening of the tent. The prisoner, deathly pale, hesitated; the officer grasped him by the collar and pushed him gently forward. As he approached the tent-pole the frantic man sprang to it and, with cat-like agility, seized the handle of the bowie knife, plucked the weapon from the scabbard, and, thrusting the Captain aside, leaped upon the General with the fury of a madman, hurling him to the ground and falling headlong upon him as he lay. The table was overturned, the candle extinguished, and they fought blindly in the darkness. The Provost-Marshal sprang to the assistance of his superior officer, and was himself prostrated upon the struggling forms. Curses and inarticulate cries of rage and pain came from the welter of limbs and bodies; the tent came down upon them, and beneath its hampering and enveloping folds the struggle went on. Private Tassman, returning from his errand and dimly conjecturing the situation, threw down his rifle, and, laying hold of the flouncing canvas at random, vainly tried to drag it off the men under it; and the sentinel who paced up and down in front, not daring to leave his beat though the skies should fall, discharged his piece. The report alarmed the camp; drums beat the long roll and bugles sounded the assembly bringing swarms of half-clad men into the moonlight, dressing as they ran, and falling into line at the sharp commands of their officers. This was well; being in line the men were under control; they stood at arms while the General’s staff and the men of his escort brought order out of confusion by lifting off the fallen tent and pulling apart the breathless and bleeding actors in that strange contention.
Breathless, indeed, was one; the Captain was dead, the handle of the bowie knife protruding from his throat and pressed back beneath his chin until the end had caught in the angle of the jaw, and the hand that delivered the blow had been unable to remove the weapon. In the dead man’s hand was his sword, clenched with a grip that defied the strength of the living. Its blade was streaked with red to the hilt.
Lifted to his feet, the General sank back to the earth with a moan and fainted. Besides his bruises he had two sword-thrusts—one through the thigh, the other through the shoulder.
The spy had suffered the least damage. Apart from a broken right arm, his wounds were such only as might have been incurred in an ordinary combat with nature’s weapons. But he was dazed, and seemed hardly to know what had occurred. He shrank away from those attending him, cowered upon the ground, and uttered unintelligible remonstrances. His face, swollen by blows and stained with gouts of blood, nevertheless showed white beneath his dishevelled hair—as white as that of a corpse.
“The man is not insane,” said the surgeon in reply to a question; “he is suffering from fright. Who and what is he?”
Private Tassman began to explain. It was the opportunity of his life; he omitted nothing that could in any way accentuate the importance of his own relation to the night’s events. When he had finished his story and was ready to begin it again, nobody gave him any attention.
The General had now recovered consciousness. He raised himself upon his elbow, looked about him, and, seeing the spy crouching by a camp-fire, guarded, said simply:
“Take that man to the parade-ground and shoot him.”
“The General’s mind wanders,” said an officer standing near.
“His mind does not wander,” the Adjutant-General said. “I have a memorandum from him about this business; he had given that same order to Hasterlick”—with a motion of the hand toward the dead Provost-Marshal—“and, by God! it shall be executed.”
Ten minutes later Sergeant Parker Adderson, of the Federal army, philosopher and wit, kneeling in the moonlight and begging incoherently for his life, was shot to death by twenty men. As the volley rang out upon the keen air of the winter midnight, General Clavering, lying white and still in the red glow of the camp-fire, opened his big blue eyes, looked pleasantly upon those about him, and said, “How silent it all is!”
The surgeon looked at the Adjutant-General, gravely and significantly. The patient’s eyes slowly closed, and thus he lay for a few moments; then, his face suffused with a smile of ineffable sweetness, he said faintly, “I suppose this must be death,” and so passed away.
THE HAND OF CARLOS
CHARLES MCCARRY
IT CAN BE NO SURPRISE that there is a long history of real-life espionage agents employing the secrets of their surreptitious trade, embellishing and fictionalizing them for the printed page. W. Somerset Maugham, Ian Fleming, John le Carré, and Graham Greene had worked for the Secret Service, and so did Charles McCarry (1930–2019), who spent eleven years as a deep cover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency in Europe, Asia, and Africa. He left the agency in 1967 so was bemused when reviewers mentioned his service, ascribing inside knowledge to him, thirty or forty years later.
Although he told absolutely no one, including his family, about his exploits, he clearly used some background material in his spy stories—not the actual incidents, of course, but the general sense of spycraft and the life of a solitary person in an often-hostile environment.
McCarry’s greatest novels feature Paul Christopher, an American agent who works for the Outfit (the CIA) modeled, inevitably, to some degree on himself; both, for example, wrote first-rate poetry. Christopher made his debut in The Miernik Dossier (1973), which is told entirely in letters, dossiers, and other documents. It was followed by his bestselling fictional theory of the assassination of President Kennedy, The Tears of Autumn (1974), in which he lays the murder at the feet of the South Vietnamese, with assistance by the Cubans and the Mafia, for what was perceived as the president’s role in the death of President Ngo Dinh Diem and the Bay of Pigs episode. Other Paul Christopher novels include The Secret Lovers (1977) and several in which he is a presence but the primary protagonists are members of his family: cousins in The Better Angels (1979) and again in Shelley’s Heart (1995), his parents in The Last Supper (1983), a daughter in Second Sight (1991), and a son in Christopher’s Ghosts (2007). The Bride of the Wilderness (1988) features seventeenth-century ancestors. Christopher Hyde, a widely read author, has written his espionage novels under the pseudonym Paul Christopher.
Countless film options of McCarry’s work have been tendered, especially for The Tears of Autumn, but only a very loosely adapted version of The Better Angels ever made it to the screen when Wrong Is Right (1982), starring Sean Connery, was released.
“The Hand of Carlos” was originally published in the Fall 1992 issue of The Armchair Detective magazine.
THE HAND OF CARLOS
CHARLES McCARRY
THE TERRORIST’S ARABIC was poor and his Farsi was nonexistent, but he had a quick ear for hidden meanings. That was why he was still alive. That was why he was alone with this mad old man, speaking French, waiting to hear the name of his target.
He inclined his head and waited for the holy man to speak again. They were seated on the floor of a plain small room in a simple house in the holy city of Qum. The holy man, squatting on the coarse wool blanket that was his bed by night and his throne by day, smelled of dust. Beside him lay the bowl from which he had eaten his lunch of rice and yoghurt; the terrorist, whose taste ran to steak au poivre, had been unable to eat the food. Now, smelling it on the old man’s sour breath, he wished that he had.
The holy man was the most successful revolutionary in the world. The richest and most ancient kingdom in the Near East lay at his feet. He imagined that he had conquered Iran by the power of his faith and the strength of his voice. But the terrorist knew that he had had help; the militant youth who were the cutting edge of the holy man’s revolution had been trained and armed in the camps of the Palestinian terror front. The terrorist himself had learned to use his workmanlike Soviet weapons—the 9-mm Makarov pistol, the Skorpion machine pistol, the AK47 assault rifle—in those camps.
In the name of the
Palestinian struggle, which was the personal cause of every progressive revolutionary in the world, the terrorist had shot an old Jew in London. He had bombed innocent people in Paris, kidnapped the head of the Iranian secret police, killed two French counter-intelligence men and a traitor, shot an Arab by mistake. He was not even an Arab: he had spilled all that blood out of idealism.
The holy man understood. It meant little to him. He was the spiritual leader of the Shi’a Moslems. To him, there was no blood except the blood spilled on the 19th of Ramadan, A.H. 40 (655 A.D.), when Ali, the son-in-law, cousin, and chosen heir of the Prophet Mohammed, was assassinated as he prayed in Mosque of Kufa.
The Shi’a believed that Islam had been led ever since by usurpers, for none but a descendant of Ali and of Mohammed’s daughter Fatima could be the true successor to the Prophet. The holy man wore the black turban of a descendant of Mohammed: he slept always on his right side, as Ali had commanded the imams to do.
The terrorist was in the presence of the holy man because he was a famous assassin. But the Shi’a had given the world the very word “assassin.” From the ranks of this sect, 800 years ago, came the Order of Assassins, the hashikin, takers of hashish, who set out systematically to murder the usurpers.
The enemies of Ali’s younger son, Hussein, had refused him water when they slew him in the desert. The Shi’a had never forgotten or forgiven this bitter act of cruelty. It was a rite of remembrance to Hussein, and to the justice of the Shi’a cause, that no pious Shi’a ever put any creature to death—not a sheep on a feast day, not a chicken bought in the bazaar, not the most hated human enemy—without first offering it a drink of water.
The holy man, at last, opened his dry lips. The terrorist leaned closer.
“The shah,” said the holy man, “must be offered a cup of water.”
The terrorist handed him a slip of paper on which a dollar sign followed by six digits had been written. The holy man nodded, wearily, in agreement.
“Shah mat,” the terrorist said. It was the only Persian he knew. It meant “the king is dead.”
* * *
—
For this operation, the terrorist took the name Paco, and he traveled out of Tehran like any ordinary person in a first-class airline seat. In his attache case, in addition to the bottle of gasoline that he could sprinkle over a stewardess in an emergency, he carried an excellent Mexican passport, forged by East German experts working with the Libyan intelligence service.
Paco was enjoying himself thoroughly. The stewardesses had that wonderful silken skin that only German girls had, and those slender long legs that bourgeois German girls were so willing to spread for the revolution. He put his hand on the waist of one of the stewardesses and smiled at her and asked for another Martell brandy.
“Only Martell,” he said. “No substitutes.”
The stewardess smiled at him and he thought that he saw the beginning of something in her eyes. Even before his plastic surgery he had always had all the girls he wanted. Now he had even more. The East German doctors had given him a better face, thinning the lips that once had looked like blue slugs, taking the flab out of the cheeks and the chin.
Paco turned back to the American professor who was his seat mate. It pleased Paco, who loved to talk and loved to lie, to tell this man that he, Paco, was an important figure in the Popular Front for the liberation of Palestine.
“The PFLP is the terrorist arm of the PLO, isn’t it?” the American asked. There was respect in his voice. Not for a moment did he doubt that Paco, who spoke English with a heavy latinate accent and drank enough cognac to kill a horse, was an Arab and a devout Moslem.
“You disapprove of terror?” Paco asked.
The professor lifted a soft bourgeois hand—who could imagine a gun or a woman’s breast in such a hand?—to protest. “I sympathize,” he said, “but…”
“There can be no ‘buts,’ ” said Paco, scowling, making this sympathizer squirm. “Did you sympathize before the terror started? We were invisible to you. We are doctors of philosophy. George Habash, our chief terrorist, is a children’s doctor. But you forced us to kill before you would see our suffering, before you would sympathize. That shows how sick you and your capitalist society are!”
The American professor gave him a look filled with shame. “I hate it as much as you do,” he said. “More, because all the heroes are on your side.”
Paco felt a rush of pleasure. How these pretenders, these toy store revolutionaries, loved to be insulted, whipped, blamed! They hated their country, their parents, their species, because they hated themselves. They were doomed.
The stewardess came back with the Martell brandy, a whole bottle, and Paco put a forefinger on the back of her hand as she poured, pressing down so that she had to fill the glass to the rim. If she knew who he really was, he could have her in the lavatory. Watching her legs as she walked away, he was tempted to follow and tell her. Showing them a gun made them hot, he knew that from experience.
* * *
—
“It is not possible,” said the sweating major. “It is not possible to go out to the camps without the personal permission of Colonel Kaddafi.”
Paco stared through his sunglasses at the sweating German. How was it that a country which produced such perfect women as the stewardess on the Lufthansa flight could also produce such pigs for men? The major was past his youth, the desert sun had reddened his skin, and there was a great wrinkle of fat on the back of his thick neck. Also, like all the East Germans who sat in every office of Libyan intelligence, he was a racist, filled with contempt for Arabs. Paco himself was exasperated by Arabs. They were undependable, inefficient, maddening in their bloody-mindedness. But they were, to Paco, the symbol of the cause. To this German, they were a subject race: beaky and circumcised.
“Kaddafi refuses me nothing,” Paco said.
“That’s your story,” the German major said. But he lifted the telephone and ordered the transport that Paco had requested.
For a rarity, it was quite true, what Paco had said: Colonel Muammar Kaddafi, dictator of Libya, financier and keeper of the weapons warehouse of international terrorism, refused this peacock of a Latin-American nothing. It was even said, and the major believed it, that Kaddafi had given Paco ten million dollars in payment for kidnapping the oil minister of Saudi Arabia and the head of Savak, the shah’s secret police. It was also said that the Saudis and the shah had put $50 million in ransom into Paco’s Swiss bank account. Anyway, he had let his prisoners go without harming a hair of their heads.
The major didn’t like him. He didn’t care if the KGB had recruited and trained him. He didn’t care about his exploits. He was a romantic, a weakling who liked women and food and liquor—and, above all, money—too much. Paco was a show-off. If he couldn’t be bought, he could be out-witted. Paco was smoking a stinking Gauloise; he chain-smoked the things.
* * *
—
The Bedouin band moved across the desert floor—black figures trudging along beside a file of camels and a horse or two. A few miles ahead of the main body, a Land Rover bucked through the rough country, stirring up a plume of dust that could be seen for miles.
Through the Perspex window of the small plane. Paco could see the weapons in the hands of the three men who rode with the headman in the Land Rover. He focused the plane’s binoculars on the vehicle. Two of the men were equipped with Czech VZ-58s, a version of the AK47 that had a nasty tendency to climb when fired on full automatic. The other carried a Dragunov sniper’s rifle, a heavy, clumsy Soviet weapon that could put a heavy slug through a vest button at 900 meters. These desert tramps were coming up in the world.
On the horizon, an hour’s drive for the Land Rover and four hours’ march for the camels, Paco could see the Bedouins’ objective, a well among the scrub. He had the Palestinian pilot make a long circle to the south, then come
in low, below the crest of the hills and out of sight of the Bedouins, and land. “Fly out low, circle, and pass over the column again,” Paco said. “Don’t let them know you’ve landed.”
The plane, an American Bonanza (Paco didn’t trust Russian aircraft engines over the desert), churned away, creating a stinging sandstorm. Paco found a hiding place on a knoll overlooking the camp ground and settled down in the shade of a rubbery anemic bush that probably had roots 50 meters deep. If you cut it down, it would reach into the soil and find moisture and grow again. Like the revolution.
In the distance Paco could see the column of dust raised by the Land Rover. He opened his pack and checked its contents. First, he checked the two 9-mm Makarov pistols, oiled and loaded and stored in Ziploc plastic bags, another marvelous contribution to civilization by the Americans. He worked the bolt on his Skorpion, only 10.6 inches long with the butt folded, but capable of spewing 7.65-mm rounds at a rate of 14 rounds a second. Four RGD-5 anti-personnel grenades, painted cheap Russian green, nestled like eggs at the bottom of the sack. They weighed only a little over half a pound, about half as much as the far more powerful U.S. Army M52 fragmentation grenades stolen from a U.S. base in West Germany by the Baader-Meinhoff Gang. Paco waited, watching the dust of the Land Rover. When he could hear its gearbox howling he took off his sunglasses so that the mirrors would not flash in the sun and give away his position.
It was dusk before Paco moved again. The crew of the Land Rover had searched the perimeter of the camp, studying the tracks of the light plane on the floor of the wadi. At last the camels came, the tents sprang up, and the cooking fires were lighted. Paco, crawling over the flinty ground, took up a position near the latrine, some 50 meters from the black tents.