Scorpion

by Andrew Kaplan

  “It’s a CRITIC from the Qatar station,” Page muttered, the light from the illuminated wall map of the Middle East making a harlequin pattern on his bald head, as if he were suffering from a splotchy skin disease. The others glanced anxiously at Page. A CRITIC was a crisis COMINT message, relayed via satellite by the Communication Intelligence radio system operated by the NSA. According to the rules, a CRITIC must be relayed directly to the White House within five minutes of transmission.

  “The Scorpion has definitely confirmed. There is an imminent assassination and coup against King Salim of Arabia,” Page announced, looking up at them with eyes that were red-rimmed from lack of sleep.

  “When and where is this alleged assassination to take place?” asked Secretary of State Wallace. He emphasized the word “alleged” so no one would doubt his position.

  Page turned to Bob Harris. “Bob?”

  “We don’t know yet. So far all we’ve got is that it’s going to be in a public place, like the Sadat hit, and that it’s going down soon, maybe a matter of days,” Harris said. Despite the late hour, he looked fresh and unrumpled.

  “Why not warn King Salim right away?” Wallace asked.

  “Great,” Page sighed. “Tell the king his brother might want to kill him, alienate both sides of the royal family, tip our hand to Abdul Sa’ad and maybe make things a hundred times worse.”

  “War in Arabia. How could things be worse?” Wallace muttered angrily, loosening his tie. A sure sign that he was furious.

  “We could lose. That’s worse,” Page snapped.

  “I don’t much like the sound of that word ‘lose,’” drawled Air Force General Baker, liaison from the Joint Chiefs, in his Tennessee twang.

  Secretary of State Wallace, whose handsome face had aged so much during the night it was virtually unrecognizable, opened a new pack of cigarettes and lit up. After a heart attack, reported in the press as an ulcer operation, Wallace had been ordered by his doctors to never touch another cigarette. For almost eight months he had succeeded in doing just that, until tonight.

  “The president will have to be told at once,” Wallace said.

  “Not just yet. You know how he hates to be woken up. Especially when all we have are bits and pieces,” said Gary Allen, the president’s Security Advisor. A tall man in tweeds, with iron-gray hair cropped short, he dipped a doughnut into his coffee for a single precise dunk, then swallowed it after chewing carefully.

  “How much more do you need?” Bob Harris challenged brusquely. “You’ve seen the Scorpion’s photos. The whole thing’s got the Kremlin’s size elevens stamped all over it.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Allen replied.

  “What about the Scorpion’s reports?” Harris said.

  Allen dismissed the reports and photos scattered on the table with an offhand gesture, as though brushing away a fly.

  “That’s evidence, not proof,” Allen said.

  “What’s the difference?” General Baker asked, puzzled.

  “Evidence is suggestive; proof is incontrovertible,” Allen declared pedantically, as if he were still at his lecture rostrum at Yale. Allen’s air of nit-picking arrogance was legendary. When the president had picked him for the job of National Security Advisor, one of his fellow professors had remarked: “Now Allen will be able to give the whole world a grade of C minus.”

  “Look at the photos,” Page insisted. The secretary of state nodded at Harris, who pressed a few buttons on a console. A screen descended on the far wall and the lights darkened. Harris fiddled for a moment with a slide projector and then the faintly blurred image of men sitting around a campfire filled the screen. Everyone in the room stared at the screen. Only Allen looked away pointedly and sighed.

  “Have we identified all the players?” Wallace asked. Page looked at Harris, who pulled open his collapsible pointer and went up to the screen.

  “That’s Abdul Sa’ad there,” Harris said, slapping the pointer against Abdul Sa’ad’s face on the screen. “He leads a fanatic anti-western Wahabi faction in the Saudi royal family. If the coup succeeds, he would be the most likely candidate for king.”

  “How did this ‘Scorpion’—Wallace pronounced the code name with distaste, as if he were being forced to swallow something disgusting—come up with Abdul Sa’ad as the ringleader?”

  “Actually, he was supposed to be on another op,” Page replied.

  “What was that?” General Baker asked.

  “He was looking for Ormont’s daughter. The one who disappeared,” Harris said.

  “Did he find her?” Wallace asked.

  “He says Abdul Sa’ad’s got her,” Harris said.

  “I see,” Allen said pensively, his expression troubled.

  “Who’s this?” Wallace asked, poking towards a face on the screen as if pushing a button.

  “That’s Nuruddin, the Bahraini millionaire. We think he could be the link to the KGB. Nuruddin was educated at Cambridge in the early thirties. We checked with the British SIS, who report that he was a member of the university Labour Club at that time. The old NKVD did a lot of recruiting from that bunch. They also discovered that he was friendly with Burgess, Maclean and, most importantly, Kim Philby, son of the famous Arabist. They could have recruited him back then,” Harris said.

  “Could have …” Allen intoned like a Greek chorus.

  “What else?” Wallace prompted.

  “The Scorpion says that this man, the one he terminated, was a major in the PLO. Our Middle East IA section tentatively identified him as Major Habad of Al Fatah. He had close ties to the Arafat faction and we know that they’re also tied closely to Moscow.”

  “Tentatively …” Allen sighed.

  “The guards at the meeting were Yemenis, Palestinians and Saudis and they carried AK-47s,” Harris said, pointedly ignoring Allen’s interjection. “The Scorpion identified this man as a South Yemeni and we know that the Russians were having secret meetings in Aden and San’a. We also have a Samos spy satellite recon photo suggesting a movement of Cuban troops from Ethiopia to Aden. Plus, we have unconfirmed reports from both ELINT and Riyadh station about South Yemeni troops moving up the Red Sea coast.”

  “Unconfirmed …” Allen said, his eyebrows raised quizzically.

  “Finally, the Scorpion says this man could be a Cuban,” Harris said through gritted teeth, tapping the photo as if poking Allen’s chest.

  “Could be …” Allen snapped derisively.

  “The Latin desk says he resembled Pablo Huevas, a senior aide to Fidel Castro,” Harris said quietly.

  “Resembles … could be … suggests!” Allen exploded. “Can you imagine the president going on television and trying to convince the world of Soviet aggression with such insubstantial crap?”

  “That’s not the point,” Page said.

  “What is the point?” General Baker asked, looking around the table for the coffee jug. There was only a trickle left in the jug and he poured it into his cup and swallowed it with a grimace.

  “What do we tell the president? That’s the damn point,” Page growled, rubbing his forehead as if he had a headache.

  “I’ll tell you what we do. We’ve got the Nimitz task force in that area. We can send in a couple of squadrons of F-14S and bomb the shit out of them,” General Baker declared, a boyish enthusiasm lighting his austere face.

  “Bomb who?” Wallace asked wearily.

  “Them … the bad guys,” General Baker said lamely.

  “Wonderful,” Harris muttered sarcastically.

  “Don’t you understand? There are no battle lines here. So far there’s just some talk of an assassination in Riyadh,” Page declared. “According to the Scorpion’s report, there might be Wahabis, army troops and National Guardsmen, Palestinians, Shiites and Christ knows who else involved in this. You can’t even tell the players without a score card and you want to just blast everybody.”

  “Not to mention the fact that we don’t even know who to support. Prince A
bdul Sa’ad might be better than having chaos in Arabia,” the secretary of state noted.

  “Well, we’ve got to do something,” General Baker rumbled, glaring balefully at them.

  “Why?” Allen put in. “I mean suppose Abdul Sa’ad wins. So we do business with him. What’s the difference?”

  “The difference is that he could … cut … off … the goddamn oil,” Harris said, enunciating very carefully, as if he were chiseling each word into stone. “And if we’re right and it is a major Russian move, then that’s exactly what he’s going to do, gentlemen.”

  “My God!” Secretary Wallace muttered in a toneless whisper, the enormity of the threat dawning on him.

  At that moment, the door opened and Linda the “Honey Pot,” as the White House staff had leeringly nicknamed her, handed General Baker a yellow paper, bending over far enough so that if there were ever any doubt about her bona fides they were erased for ever. But all eyes were on the paper, not on her and she wiggled back out of the door with a vague air of disappointment.

  “Oh boy,” the general whistled through his teeth and glanced up at the illuminated map.

  “What is it?” the worried secretary of state asked.

  “It’s from naval intelligence. A Soviet naval force headed by the missile cruiser Sokolov is moving towards the Straits of Hormuz. This is from a recon patrol from the Nimitz,” General Baker said in an awed voice, as though he were in church.

  For a long moment no one said anything. Each man sat stunned and somehow alone, as though they were in the presence of sudden death. The secretary of state put a cigarette between his lips but forgot to light it. Gary Allen’s aristocratic face was drawn and pale.

  “Well, Mr. Allen. Do you still think the Kremlin tie-in is pure speculation?” Bob Harris’s caustic voice cut rudely through the silence.

  The national security advisor got up awkwardly and walked over to the illuminated map. He stared at the narrow inverted blue vee of the Straits of Hormuz like a man in a trance. At last he turned to face them. His eyes were stunned, like a cow that’s been killed by a blow to the head from a pneumatic hammer but doesn’t know yet that it is dead.

  “The president will have to be told at once,” he said through bloodless lips.

  General Baker crossed to a bank of black telephones on a side table and picked up one of the receivers.

  “I’d better alert the Joint Chiefs. What about the Rapid Deployment Force?” he asked to the room at large.

  “Tell them to go to Defcon Three Ready status,” Wallace said. Baker looked questioningly at Allen who nodded his assent.

  “The Marines too,” Allen said quietly. “And we’ll want a spy ship of the Liberty class in the Red Sea to monitor the Yemenis,” he added.

  Baker nodded and punched a button on the phone. He began talking in an urgent undertone. Allen went to a separate red phone and hesitated a moment before picking it up.

  “Everything seems to depend on the data from this Scorpion of yours,” he said to Page, obviously worried.

  “Just who the hell is this Scorpion anyway?” Wallace snapped irritably.

  “He’s an independent. But the boys tell me he’s virtually a legend in Arabia,” Page said.

  “The president will want to know all about him. You know how he is about data on personalities,” Allen remarked with a wry smile.

  Page nodded. The daily DIA-CIA intelligence report on leading political figures and their sexual peccadillos was said to be the president’s favorite bedtime reading.

  “Is he an American?” Allen asked.

  “Bob?” Page looked questioningly at Harris, leaning back in his chair until it tilted precariously.

  “He’s an American, all right. Born in Palos Verdes, California.”

  “What makes him such an expert on the Arabs anyway?” asked Wallace, his brow wrinkled to show his distaste at having to place any reliance on one of the CIA hotshots, particularly an independent, whom he often irritably referred to as “wild men” within the privacy of his State Department office.

  “Because he was raised among the Beduin in Arabia,” Harris said, an impudent grin creasing his cheeks.

  Allen, who had been about to pick up the red phone, turned to Harris, annoyed disbelief written on his face as clearly as if Harris had told him that the Scorpion’s real name was Clark Kent.

  “Just how in hell did an American kid wind up being raised by Beduin tribesmen?” Allen demanded belligerently, as if he felt he was being used as the butt of a joke.

  “That …” Harris replied, “is a hell of a story.”

  PART TWO

  Prescribed for you is fighting, though it be hateful to you. Yet it may happen that you will hate a thing which is better for you; and it may happen that you will love a thing which is worse for you; God knows, and you know not.

  —The Koran

  Arabia, 1951

  THE BOY LOOKED DOWN at the man who was said to be his father and wondered if he was dead. The man lay face-down in the sand, a large rust-colored stain slowly spreading across the back of his sun-bleached khaki shirt. In the distance the boy could see the horsemen with the guns rapidly approaching. Tentatively at first, then more urgently, the boy plucked at the man’s arm.

  “Dad,” he said. “C’mon, Dad.”

  The man didn’t move. Was that death? the boy wondered. He’d never seen a dead person before. He looked around for the others, but he was the only one moving. Robby the geologist was slumped over the rig struts as though he was sleeping. Shwayhat, Dad’s Arab guide, lay crumpled in an awkward posture. Dad always called Shwayhat his “go-fer,” but Nick didn’t understand why he called the Arab that. Gramps had told him that a “go-fer” was a little brown animal, like a mouse. Billy, the rigger, was the worst. He lay staring at the sky, his arms flung wide like a picture of Jesus which Gran had shown him in the Golden Bible for Children. There was a big red wound on the side of Billy’s face and little black things were crawling on it. It made Nick feel sick and he turned away.

  The shooting had come without warning and Billy had jumped on Nick, pushing his face into the hot sand. Billy was heavy on him and Nick tried to shove him away, but he couldn’t. Billy smelled funny. It was the same smell as Mom when she would come home from a date, bumping into the furniture and saying funny things in a slurred voice. Sometimes Mom would bring home an “uncle” and yell at him because he was still up. He had lots of uncles, but they always left in the morning.

  It was just Mom and Nicky then. Dad had left them alone to find something called “oil.” Nick figured that it was something he had lost during the war. Mom said Dad was a “bastid” to leave them, but she mixed her words sometimes and he thought she meant “basket.” A basket was a bad thing. She always made Nick promise not to be a basket when he grew up. Dad was a wildcatter and all wildcatters were baskets, Mom said.

  The worst wildcatters came from Texas. Dad had come from Texas and Mom met him in San Diego. That was during the war when Dad was a “C.B.,” whatever that was. Then Mom and Dad got divorced because Dad was a basket. That was what divorce meant: when a dad goes away.

  One night Mom left him with Gramps and Gran. She went out with Uncle Stan. Nick remembered that Mom and Uncle Stan were laughing and their breath smelled funny, like Billy. In the morning he woke to find Gran sitting on his bed. Her eyes were puffy and red and she hugged him close. He didn’t like being held and tried to wriggle out of her grasp, but she held him tightly.

  “Oh my poor baby,” Gran cried and Nick’s heart beat wildly, like the wings of a trapped bird. He’d never seen Gran act this way before. He wrinkled his nose. Gran didn’t smell like Mom. She smelled old. She told him there had been an “accident” and he was afraid she was going to punish him. Sometimes he had an accident at night and woke up with the bed wet and smelling of “pee-pee” and Mom would get mad at him.

  She told him that Mom was dead. Uncle Stan too. She said dead meant that Mom had gone away to be with Jesus in
heaven. He asked Gran when Mom was coming back and she just shook her head and hugged him again. She asked him if he understood and he said yes. Mom had gone away. That’s what grown-ups did: they went away.

  When he went down for breakfast, he looked around for Mom, just in case she might’ve come back. He looked all over the house, but he couldn’t find her. The next day, they dressed him in a suit and tie and took him to the funeral home. They said Mom was in a box by the altar, but Gran wouldn’t let him look. She said that it wasn’t really Mom in the coffin. Mom was in heaven.

  They drove to the cemetery in a big black car. The minister, a tall skinny man with a funny nasal voice, talked about peace and heaven and Gran cried. Nick looked down the green slope towards the freeway. The grass was speckled with white markers like stone sheep. The lanes of traffic shimmered in the smoggy sunlight and on a distant billboard, a man and woman embraced against a giant cigarette package.

  The minister picked up a handful of dirt and poured it into Nick’s hand. He told Nick to throw it into the grave. Nick pressed away from the grave, afraid that if he went too close to the edge he would fall in and be locked in the earth forever. The minister took his hand and tried to make him throw the dirt. Nick’s snub-nosed face became contorted and he bared his teeth like a wolf cub. He threw the dirt in the minister’s face. The minister stood there blinking stupidly as Gramps took Nick’s hand and led him back to the car.

  From then on he lived with Gran and Gramps. Esmeralda the maid took him to the nursery every day. At dinner he had to sit still and not speak until spoken to. One night Gran said she wouldn’t have that man in her house and Nick’s heart began to pound. He somehow knew, although he didn’t know how, that they were speaking about his father.

  Gran didn’t like his father. She said his neck was red and he made loud noises when he ate. She looked disgusted when she said that, like the time when he had found a garter snake in the garden. It was a question of breeding, Gran said, looking pointedly at Nick. You were supposed to keep your mouth closed and chew each bite properly. That showed you had good manners.