Hunter Killer (51 page)

FRIDAY, APRIL
16, 12:30
P.M
. (
LOCAL
)
OUTSKIRTS OF BEIRUT

Shakira Rashood had been an active member of the terrorist organization Hamas since she was twelve years old. She was rarely out of reach of an AK-47 rifle and she had served on combat operations ever since she was seventeen.

She and Rashood had fled a battle in the Jerusalem Road, Hebron, in the hours after they first met four years before. He saved her life, then she saved his. Their subsequent marriage was conducted inside the deepest councils of Hamas, of which General Rashood swiftly became the Commander in Chief.

They had thus met and married in the harshest of environments, a place without sentimentality, only a brutal desire for victory. But theirs was a love match, and the beautiful Palestinian Shakira, stuck now in a diabolical traffic holdup five miles out of Beirut, was beside herself with worry.

She sensed danger. Why did Rashood want so much money? Why had he been so reluctant to talk after all these weeks apart? Why had he told her to be sure to bring her rifle, when he knew she never made a journey without it?

Every inch of her sensed that something terrible was happening. Again she leaned on the horn of the Range Rover, like everyone else. There were few places in the Middle East where traffic could snarl as comprehensively as around Beirut.

As ever, the holdup was caused by a young man driving at a lunatic speed, zigzagging in and out of traffic, and then managing to hit a construction truck head on. The young man was of course the only driver who no longer cared one way or another whether his car started or stopped.

But about three hundred other drivers did, especially Shakira, who was held up for forty minutes, which seemed like six hours. There may have been a better way around the city, but if there was she missed it. Shakira headed north toward the coast, straight down the Rue Damas, and swung right onto the Avenue Charles Hevlou, a wide throughway that became jammed solid after a half mile.

The clock ticked on. It was almost two o’clock. And again they were dealing with an accident. Much of Beirut was still a building site, while contractors attempted to rebuild the shattered city in the long aftermath of the civil war. The crash on Avenue Hevlou was caused by a young man who, apparently inflamed by two huge trucks double parking, had made a break for it around the outside and hit a crane
bang
in the middle of the road.

By the time the accident was cleared, Shakira Rashood had twenty-eight miles to cover in forty-five minutes. Eventually she was compelled to start driving like a native, speeding up the coast road, with the blue Mediterranean to her left and the endless coastal plain in front of her.

The Range Rover raced along in the traffic, often making eighty miles per hour. And the last miles were endless. She sped into tiny Byblos from the east at 3:05
P.M
. and followed the tourist signs to the ruins.

It was raining when she reached the parking area and got out of the car. Right next to the entrance was a stationary Peugeot, its hefty, tough-looking occupant just heading into the main door of the castle.

Shakira’s sixth sense, the one that had kept her alive in tougher spots than this, took over. One hundred yards from the man, she began to run, her feet pounding through the puddles, her breath coming in short angry bursts. Her AK-47 was tucked under her right arm, beneath her raincoat, and could not be seen. She was sobbing as she ran inside the castle. Beside herself with fear, she bolted into the dark passageway. Rashood, she knew, was in desperate danger.

3:07
P.M
.
CRUSADER CASTLE, SECOND FLOOR

Rashood and Gamoudi were cornered, flattened against the stone wall on either side of the door. Their three armed French Secret Service pursuers were gathered outside, and had already decided the best way to get this over was for two of them to come in firing. There was no escape, and whatever happened, there was a two-man backup outside.

There were no windows in the room, but there was a former window, just the bricked-up stone frame five feet above the ground to the left of the doorway looking out. Jammed inside the frame, his feet rammed into the lower corners, was Jacques Gamoudi, in position, on higher ground than his attackers.

The two French hit men came in together. And Gamoudi shouted, “This way!” The man on the right coming in turned, and Gamoudi shot him clean between the eyes. The second man, on Rashood’s side of the doorway, also swung around to his right in search of the person who had shouted.

That was not smart. Rashood blew away the back of his head with a sustained burst from his machine pistol. Both the men slumped down onto the stone floor.

On the steps leading up to the corridor Shakira heard the shots and was gripped by a cold terror she had never before experienced. She kept repeating Rashood’s name over and over, as if it would somehow keep him safe.

The trouble was, Rashood’s cover was blown. Whoever else was outside in the passage now knew that both he and Gamoudi were in there, one on either side of the doorway. Secret Service combat officers have a way of dealing with such matters—possibly a couple of grenades.

The third man who waited outside did not have them. The fourth man coming along the corridor had three. Very calmly he passed one over to his colleague and began to loosen the firing pin.

At which point the near-hysterical Shakira came racing around the corner, tears streaming down her face, but now with her AK-47 raised to hip height.

Both men spun around at the same time. The man she had followed dropped one of the grenades, mercifully with the pin still tight, and swung his rifle straight toward her. Too late. Shakira Rashood opened fire, pouring hot lead into both men, neck and head, just like General Rashood had taught her.

“If you’ve killed him…I swear to God…if you’ve killed him!”
The words tumbled from her without reason. She stumbled over the two bodies and carelessly rushed into the stone room where her husband was still flattened against the wall and Jacques Gamoudi was still jammed into the granite window frame.

“I told you not to be late,” said the General, in that modulated Harrow School accent. “You could have got us all killed.” Which proved, in a sense, you can take the officer out of the British Army, but you can’t take the British Army out of the officer.

Shakira did not actually care what he said, so long as he was still breathing. She rushed across the floor and hurled herself into his arms, allowing her rifle to drop with a clatter. Over and over, she said, “Thank God…thank God.”

Meanwhile, Jacques Gamoudi, who was still positioned halfway up the wall, cleared his throat theatrically and suggested that they had all better get out of there very fast, before someone charged them with four murders.

He jumped down from the ledge and led the way out into the corridor and down the stone stairway. The place was deserted aside from two groups of tourists. Beirut and its environs had retained its dangerous reputation over the years, and that coastline was still not especially popular among visitors, who thought they might be kidnapped. God alone knew what the first group to go inside would think when they stumbled on the four French hit men lying dead on the second floor, covered in blood and surrounded by hand grenades and rifles. Ravi Rashood mentioned that he was not anticipating a unanimous vote of thanks from the local tourist board.

Rashood told the embassy driver to head straight for the airport. He then used his cell phone to call two of his aides in Damascus and asked them to drive over to Byblos to pick up the Range Rover. The extra key was in the house on Bab Touma Street. Then he called the Saudi pilot and told him to file an immediate flight plan to Marrakesh, refuel the King’s Boeing, and be ready to take off in a real hurry, about one hour from then.

They had traveled six fast miles south before the Hamas General found time to introduce Jacques Gamoudi to his wife. Of course, as a red-blooded Frenchman, or at least a French citizen, Gamoudi had scarcely taken his eyes off the neck-snapping, walnut-eyed, gazelle-legged Palestinian goddess, and when he muttered,
“Mon plaisir,”
he
really
meant it.

But the situation here in Beirut was now menacing. The three of them sat in tense but companionable silence most of the way to the airport.

“Does anyone know why we’re going to Morocco?” asked Shakira finally.

“Well, it’s been a difficult decision,” said her husband. “Jacques is probably in more danger than we are, because he has the entire French Secret Service trying to kill him. You and I are in no more danger than usual. But Colonel Gamoudi has to get out of the Middle East, somewhere he can lie low for a few months, get his breath back. And his instinct is to fly back to Morocco, to his home up in the Atlas Mountains. No one’s likely to find him there. He and his father were both guides.”

“Are we going too?”

“Uh-huh. We’re staying with Jacques until I know he’s safe.”

“Is that why you wanted all this money—for airfares?”

“No. We’ve got a plane.”

“Will it hold three?”

“It’ll hold two hundred, plus crew.”

Shakira just shook her head. “Well, that’s okay then,” she said. “I was able to get a hundred thousand U.S. dollars from the bank.”

“Shakira,” said Rashood. “Aside from the lateness, I’d have to say you have excelled this morning, as a wife, a financier, and a marksman.”

“Thank you, General,” said Shakira, laughing. “It’s been my pleasure to work with you.”

It was amazing how thoroughly this Palestinian beauty had absorbed that British sense of irony from her husband. It’s not a natural way of thinking for any Arab, but Rashood thought it definitely suited her.

He leaned back in his seat, having cheated the Grim Reaper once more, and told her, “In the last twenty-four hours, I can say I owe my life to the former Shakira Sabah, and Jacques reckons he owes his to E. M. Forster.”

“Who’s Eeyem Forster?” demanded Shakira. “I never even heard that name Eeyem before?”

“He’s not Eeyem,” said Rashood carefully. “He’s E. M. Letters. The initials of his Christian names.”

Shakira thought about that for a moment, smiled, and said, “You mean like G. A. Nasser, or O. B. Laden?” knowing full well it sounded ridiculous. “Anyway, you still haven’t told me. Who is he?”

“He’s a very famous English novelist. My school insisted we read a couple of his books for A levels.”

“What books did he write?”

“Well, I suppose his best-known one is
A Passage to India.”

“I’ve seen the movie,” cried Shakira in triumph.
“Mrs. Moore!…Mrs. Moore!…Mrs. Moore!”

“So you have,” replied her husband, chuckling gently. “Forster had a very sensitive touch with subjects like loyalty, treatment of those less fortunate, and, I suppose most of all, friendship.”

“Yes, but…” said Shakira, employing her most reliable form of questioning, when she was starting to dig deeply into a subject. “How did he save Jacques’s life? Does he live in Saudi Arabia?”

“No, he’s been dead for forty years,” said Rashood. “But his words inspired a colleague of Jacques’s to treat their friendship more seriously than he treated a government order.”

“Was he ordered to kill you, Jacques?”

“Yes, Shakira. Yes, he was.”

“And he didn’t because he remembered the words of Eeyem?”

“Yes, that’s what he said,” replied Gamoudi.

“Hmm,” said Shakira. “You too have read his books?”

“No, I have never read them. But I think I will now.”

“Then I think you’d better get started,” said Shakira gravely.

“This Eeyem, he’s a very influential man.”

By this time they were within a couple of miles of Beirut International Airport. The traffic was terrible, and General Rashood again called the pilot on his cell phone and told him to be ready.

The embassy driver turned in through the cargo area and made straight for the runway where private aircraft were parked. The car pulled right up to the waiting Saudi Boeing 737, and the three of them rushed up the stairway.

The flight attendants, who had been hanging around all night, not disembarking, greeted them cheerfully. “Marrakesh, nonstop?” one of them said.

“If you would,” replied General Rashood.

“It’s almost twenty-three hundred miles,” the flight attendant replied. “And that’ll take us almost five hours. But we pick up three hours on the time difference. We should be there around five-thirty in the evening.”

By now the aircraft was rolling, thundering down the runway. The flight attendant, a young Arabian would-be pilot, hastily sat down and clipped on a safety belt, which was not a complication since there were close to 200 spare seats.

The Boeing screamed up into the blue skies above the eastern Mediterranean and set a westerly course. And as it did so, the CIA agent in the airport, the one who had arrived too late in the small hours of the morning, reached for his cell phone and hit the buttons to Beirut flight control.

He spoke to his airport contact. Twenty seconds later he knew the Saudi King’s aircraft was heading to Marrakesh, with three passengers who had arrived in a Saudi embassy car.

There was one difference between the two latest departures of the Boeing. In King Khalid Airport, Riyadh, the captain had not been obliged to file a flight plan. Here in Beirut, he was. And that put the Americans ahead of the game, because the six French agents in Lebanon were temporarily stymied. Four of them were dead inside the Crusaders’ Castle. The other two were still parked outside the Saudi embassy.

The U.S. field agent dialed Langley direct, and reported that the King’s Boeing had just taken off, heading directly for Marrakesh, no stops. Langley moved swiftly. They immediately contacted Lt. Commander Ramshawe and asked him for a degree of certainty on his report that Col. Jack Gamoudi had been born in the tiny village of Asni.

Lt. Commander Ramshawe, who had spent days searching through computerized French military data, had managed to file away a copy of Jacques Gamoudi’s birth certificate, courtesy of Andy Campese in Toulouse and a Foreign Legion filing clerk in Aubagne, who had reacted favorably to Campese’s five-hundred-dollar bribe.