Death Beam, page 44
The men waiting on the clifftop flattened themselves to the ground as the Yemeni driver braked to a halt. One of the East Germans, the one wearing a lieutenant’s uniform, nervously scanned the ridges above him. The other swung the heavy machine gun in a slow arc.
Then the East German lieutenant barked an order, and the armored car reversed quickly back down the road, out of the ravine.
“Have we blown it?” Hammond whispered.
They had their answer within a couple of minutes.
The East German lieutenant and six of the Yemenis came walking back up the road, their Kalashnikovs cradled at the ready. When they saw no sign of life, they formed up a work party. Five of the Yemenis started trying to shift the rocks, while the lieutenant and another soldier kept watch.
“Take them when you hear my signal,” Canning whispered to Hammond. “Abdullah and I will take the others.”
Hammond nodded, readying his compact MP5 submachine gun. Canning took his short-barreled pump shotgun in one hand and a six-inch fighting knife in the other. Hammond noticed that Abdullah was bristling with knives.
On the other side of the ridge, the East German sergeant was still manning his heavy machine gun, and the Yemeni driver was still at his seat. The remaining men were slouched by the roadside, sunning themselves. No one seemed to be paying any attention to the radio. Abdullah’s first knife, thrown from a distance of thirty feet, caught the sergeant just below the chin. He collapsed almost soundlessly, with the low noise of the last sink water going down the drain. As the driver turned, mouth agape, Abdullah’s second knife thudded into his chest, just below the collarbone. The other Yemeni soldiers, shaking from their stupor, had not had time to aim their weapons before Canning downed two of them, pumping shells from his shotgun. The third dropped his gun and started running. Abdullah took aim with the new M-40 rifle the Englishman had given him as a token of friendship—and an inducement to join the mission—and shot him between the shoulder blades.
The sound of automatic fire from back along the road, in the ravine, stopped a few minutes later.
As Canning later observed, they had earned themselves a first-class ticket to the Camp of the Martyrs.
He was sitting in the front seat of the armored car, wearing the uniform of the East German lieutenant. It had only one bullet hole, too low down to be noticed from outside the vehicle, and, as he had predicted, it fitted fairly well for something off the hook. Hammond’s uniform, with its sergeant’s stripes, was without bullet holes. But the trousers were about four inches too short and he had left the tunic partly unbuttoned for fear that the seams might burst.
CAMP OF THE MARTYRS, NEAR AL-GHEIDDA,
SOUTH YEMEN, November 29
The small man with the fixed smile and a napkin over his arm hovered by the center table in the officers’ mess after serving the mezze. The Russian in civilian clothes seemed to be irritated by the waiter’s attentions. He muttered something to Langemann, the East German camp commandant. The East German shooed the waiter back into the kitchen.
Most of the conversation at the table was in English, a language that the waiter understood well. He had a quick mind, this particular waiter, to match the rapid movements with which he darted about on his short legs. His friends called him Lizard. His British employers had adopted the nickname as his working cryptonym. The Lizard noted that the Russian’s English was stilted, the product, no doubt, of a crash course in a language laboratory. When the Russian had trouble communicating, he would switch back to his native tongue. The third man at the table, the Palestinian, obviously understood some Russian, but appeared to be embarrassed at being required to sustain conversation in it. But the Lizard, a quick judge of character, had gauged that this was not the root cause of the Palestinian’s nervousness. From the moment the three men had entered the canteen, it had been plain that the Palestinian was terrified of the Russian. From the few phrases that the Lizard had been able to catch, he had learned only that there was some question about whether the Palestinian would be taken to Moscow. That, and the name he had just heard mentioned. Sammy Hamad. That confirmed that this was the man that the Lizard’s British employers were seeking. Tonight, he thought, he would try to sneak out of the camp to the radio transmitter he had secreted in a niche at the base of the fieldstone wall around his house.
The hour was early for lunch, and the officers’ mess was almost deserted. A couple of East Germans were sitting in the corner of the canteen, as far away from the Russian’s table as possible. Everyone, even Langemann, seemed to live in fear of the new arrival. He must be a powerful man at Moscow Center, the Lizard concluded. His presence would also interest the Firm. On the pretext of delivering another round of the fizzy local beer, served up in tall brown bottles, he re-entered the mess. Behind him, the smell of sizzling lamb kebabs wafted out of the kitchens. The East German instructors at the camp ate a lot better than their trainees, who came not only from all over the Arab world, but from Latin America, Italy, Holland, Ireland, and even the United States.
The Palestinian seized the beer gratefully, but the Russian roughly took the bottle away from him. Noting the gesture, the Lizard decided he had been correct in his guess that the special security precautions that had been arranged for Sammy Hamad meant not that he was a VIP guest, but that he was a prisoner. This Palestinian whom he had seen swaggering about a couple of years before, secure and self-important in his special relationship with the Soviets, had somehow fallen under a cloud.
Langemann ordered the waiter to hurry up with the lunch service, and he scurried back out to the kitchens. He relayed the order to the fat, oily Yemeni cook, who had run a cheap whorehouse down by the docks in Aden before the British left and the new regime, in its early flush of revolutionary puritanism, had the establishment closed down. The cook slewed the saliva around in his mouth and ceremonially spat once on each of the kebabs that he was now removing from the grill. The skewers were like long, narrow steel knives.
As the Lizard returned to the canteen with the nine kebabs tastefully arranged on a large salver, he saw that the room was beginning to fill up. He frowned slightly as he assessed the two new arrivals, an East German lieutenant he had never set eyes on before and a sergeant. They must be bearing a dispatch, he thought, since NCOs were not admitted to the officers’ mess. Furthermore, this sergeant was improperly dressed. His jacket was not correctly buttoned, and his trousers looked as if they had shrunk in the wash. Worst of all, he still had his automatic rifle slung from his shoulder.
Langemann, the commandant, got up from the table so fast that he almost collided with the tray of food that the Lizard had been preparing to serve. Langemann glared balefully at these unfamiliar soldiers whose breach of protocol had embarrassed him in the presence of his most important Russian visitor.
The lieutenant’s eyes flicked from one face in the room to the next, taking in the two East Germans sitting by the far wall. His gaze came to rest on the Palestinian.
“Sammy Hamad?” the unfamiliar lieutenant inquired coolly.
The Palestinian’s reflexes were quicker than those of his lunch companions. Langemann stood frozen in rage as Charles Canning pulled out his heavy service pistol and Dick Hammond unslung his rifle. The Russian had his beer stein halfway to his mouth. But Sammy Hamad slid off his chair, scampered between Langemann’s legs, and ran, ducking and weaving, toward the kitchen.
Dick Hammond, covering the far table, shot one of the East Germans while he was still fumbling at his holster. The second had time to fire back, but the shot went wild. Hammond fired again, aiming for the stomach, and the man dropped to the floor.
Langemann had even less chance. As he groped for his own gun, Canning put a 9mm bullet between his eyes with the same impersonal exactitude he would have applied to hitting the center of a bull’s-eye.
The Russian put his hands up.
“All right, tovarich,” said Canning. “Just stand quietly against the wall over there, will you? Keep an eye on him, Dick.”
Canning was already running toward the kitchen, after Sammy Hamad.
“Look out, Charles!”
Hammond’s shouted warning came too late. A bullet clanged against the barrel of Canning’s automatic, knocking it from his hand. So the Palestinian still had a gun. As Hammond crouched down, trying to cover the Englishman from behind, a second bullet zinged past. The American gave a short cry of pain. A dark-red stain began to spread on his left arm, just below the shoulder, as he tried to steady the rifle with his other arm.
As the shooting began, the Lizard had dropped his salver and remained hunched down below one of the tables. He now saw the action unfolding jerkily, almost in separate frames, as in an animated cartoon that is being wound too slowly. While Canning was scrabbling around on the floor, the Russian, who had been pressed motionless to the wall, was now reaching for his own gun, unnoticed by either of the strangers wearing East German uniforms. In the next frame, the Lizard assessed, the Russian would shoot the man who had had his gun blown out of his hand. The Lizard was sure that the two intruders must have been sent by the Firm. By his own employer.
The Lizard had not survived through futile acts of heroics but by skulking, unnoticed, in the shadows. He now did something that was thoroughly untypical. He scooped up three of the sword-like skewers in one hand and two in the other and ran, full-pelt, at the Russian. There was a hiss like escaping gas as the Lizard drove the five steel points into the well-padded Russian’s chest and stomach. The Russian screamed, and blood began to spurt from him in all directions. He bled, the Lizard thought philosophically, exactly like a stuck pig. He savored the short moment of dreamlike objectivity that comes to a man who has chosen the circumstances of his own death. His hands were still on the skewers when the East German security guards burst through the door of the canteen and pumped so many machine-gun bullets into him that his corpse was still writhing and dancing on the floor after life had expired.
In the kitchen, the cook had flattened himself, trembling, against the open door of the pantry. Crumbs from the baklava he had been munching while preparing lunch for the East Germans were visible on his stubbly chins. Sammy Hamad ignored the Yemeni. He was aiming his pistol at the hollow between Canning’s shoulder blades as the Englishman stooped on the linoleum-covered floor, redolent of the disinfectant with which Commandant Langemann had insisted it be swabbed three times a day.
Canning could not see his pistol. But he could see the toe of one of Sammy Hamad’s desert boots.
“Move, Charles!” he heard Hammond yell as the shooting erupted from behind them, in the dining room.
There was nothing else, the Englishman realized, that he could do.
Weaponless, he hurled himself at the Palestinian, his fingers tensed into claws that were reaching for Sammy Hamad’s throat, his eyes.
The Palestinian pulled the trigger of his Makarov automatic before Canning reached him.
And his gun jammed.
Sammy Hamad ran back into the kitchen, looking for an exit.
Canning clutched at the handle of the heavy butcher's knife on the chopping block beside the oven. The cook had been using it to slice the lamb for the kebabs.
The Englishman caught up with Sammy Hamad before he had managed to unfasten the heavy bolts on the kitchen door. He pulled the Palestinian’s head back by the hair. And cut his throat in the style approved by the Dhofaris, slipping the blade in smoothly behind the windpipe.
“This is for Max,’’ Canning breathed.
Hammond, sniping at the East German guards who had overrun the canteen from the cover of the kitchen doorway, glanced back at the scene behind him and turned quickly away, slightly nauseous.
36
WASHINGTON, November 29
Jerry Sarkesian turned off the engine of his rheumatic Volkswagen in the Rosslyn parking lot and decided that he was disgusted with his life. His wife was nagging at him to get rid of the car, which had developed an ominous banging sound somewhere inside the motor. She had vetoed his plan to go out to dinner at the Orleans House, where he could load up with as much bread and salad, smothered in creamy dressing, as he could eat, on top of a man-sized plate of prime ribs. Instead they were going to a Japanese eatery where the chefs played at being Zorro with the food right under your nose. If she disliked having a fat husband, he had told her, she should marry somebody else. He had long passed the stage when he was likely to be converted to bean shoots and jogging. Anyway, she was not much of a clothes hanger herself. She had probably been stocking up on chocolate-chip cookies all afternoon to get through the evening meal.
The dismal prospect of dinner with his wife had deepened Jerry Sarkesian’s gloom. But it was not its main source. That was the funny thing. The man from the Agency’s Office of Security normally felt a sense of euphoria when he had finished a successful interrogation and closed the book on a case. Not this time.
He kept thinking about the lonely, dumpy little woman he had been grilling every couple of days for almost three weeks. And about her kid, who looked so unlike her, with his black hair, his fine, sensitive features and dark, intelligent eyes. He felt as virtuous about breaking Trudy Cook as he would have felt about stealing from a collection box. She had no anchor in her life, nothing to hold on to. The Russians, she knew, had abandoned her. Martini, the man who had bedded her, recruited her for the KGB, and, in all likelihood, fathered her child, was back in Moscow. If he cared what happened to her, he had not bothered to send a message. Her control, Malinovsky, had run out on her as soon as the investigators started to close in, without even taking the trouble to send her a warning signal.
Would she have taken the boy and gone to Moscow if they had asked her? Jerry Sarkesian was not sure of the answer to that. Trudy Cook might be a traitor, but she was not a Communist or an admirer of the Soviet system. Despite all that she had brought to the KGB—including the life of Hussar, and the lives of other Russians who had made contact with the Agency—she had not done it out of conviction. She was not cast in the mold of the agents the Soviets recruited in the thirties, true believers who were convinced that Moscow held the secret of the perfect society. The damage she had been able to do was out of all proportion to her character and her motives. She had been inspired by emotions no more exalted than those that led a bored housewife in a midafternoon soap opera into the arms of a handsome stranger: by loneliness and hope. The hope of finding real passion, perhaps even love. Trudy Cook made the mistake of choosing a Russian spy instead of a traveling salesman. That meant signing a contract with no escape clause.
She had not stood up to Jerry Sarkesian’s insistent questioning for long. He suspected that that was not only because she felt no loyalty toward the Russians, who had callously ditched her, but because of her anguish over what had happened to Les Winter. The head of the Agency’s Soviet Division had been more than her boss over many years. He had been almost her idol. Why else would she name her child - Martini’s child - after Les Winter? Ironically, over an amazingly long period of time there had been no direct contradiction between her work for the Russians and her fierce loyalty to her Agency boss. On the contrary. The material supplied by Martini had strengthened Les Winter in the Agency’s internal feuds. Martini had been Winter’s trump card in his contest with Max Zimmer. In many ways, Winter’s career had been built on the webs of deception spun by Krylov in Moscow Center.
That had all changed after Max Zimmer’s murder. Then the webs had begun to unravel. Suspicion turned on Winter, and, although he was cleared in the end of the charge of being a Soviet mole, enough of his past came crawling out of the places he had tried to bury it to destroy his Agency-career. He agreed to accept premature retirement. That, more than the knowledge that she had caused the death of Hussar, was the root of the intense feeling of guilt that had undermined Trudy Cook’s will to resist interrogation. Sarkesian felt that Les Winter, more than he himself, had been responsible for her confession.
Sarkesian wondered what would happen to the boy. Martini’s boy. He doubted that the father would ever send for him. Someone had said Trudy Cook had an aunt living in Salt Lake City. Maybe Martini’s son would grow up a Mormon.
37
VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, CALIF., November 29
On the video monitors in the control room at the specially prepared launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base, the President watched the orange flash and the rising clouds of vapor as the rocket engines ignited.
“Lift-off, Mr. President,” General Brennan murmured as the twin booster rockets carried the first of his Cosmic Interceptors upward into space. “There was a time when I thought we weren’t gonna make it.”
The President shook hands, one by one, with the men gathered around him in the control station: the scientist, Ed Greenhouse; the Defense Secretary, Jake Waggoner; the Secretary of State, Henry Peyton; his National Security Adviser, Trip Gage. And George Brennan. It was odd to find them all together without a press camera in sight. It was not an occasion for the media, the President had flatly ruled. But it was an occasion that none of them had wanted to miss.
“This is a proud day for the United States,” said the President. “And I am proud that the launch took place in my home state. The step we have taken today makes it possible to hope that mankind can end the long reign of nuclear terror.”
“The Soviets will try again, of course,” Secretary Peyton observed. “But for the first time in years, we have the edge. The commanding edge.”
“The only reason we ever lost it,” General Brennan chipped in, “is that we allowed our nerve and our judgment processes to be eroded. Mr. President, you may be familiar with the story of the three men who were shipwrecked on a cannibal island.”
