Reprisal (19 page)

He loaded magazines for the rifles and tested them. Like the pistols, they were in perfect condition.
Both shot a few inches to the right and high, but he had no time to mess with that now—they would just have to shoot a few
inches to the left and low. He played around with the adjustments on the telescopic sight until he was familiar with it. These
Galils were basically Israeli ripoffs of the Soviet Kalashnikov assault rifle, with one important difference—they were better!
The gun took 5.56 mm ammo in a thirty-five-round detachable box magazine, was gas operated and weighed about ten pounds loaded.
Dartley knew the weapon well. It had only two drawbacks: the protective ring on the Valmettype front sight, which could be
sawed and filed off into wings if he had time—which he didn’t—and the awkward carry handle, which always reminded him of a
paint roller handle and which he removed from both guns.

He looked at the missiles, having left these for last. The three tubes had their warheads already fitted, each tapering to
a fine point. Warhead and tube measured about four feet long, and the tube had four large fins along two-thirds of its length,
sticking out about a foot.

Dartley knew what they were, though he had never used them before: the Messerschmitt Cobra 2000. He lifted one out of the
spacious trunk, being careful not to damage it; it was not easy to lift because it was awkward to carry and weighed about
twenty-five pounds. He set it down on the ground on two of its fins. The unusual thing about this missile was that it did
not use a launcher. You just set it on its fins, making sure that the booster—placed between one pair of fins—was pointing
toward the
ground. You then wired the booster to the aiming unit, along with several other of these missiles. After firing a missile,
you tracked the target with an optical sight on the aiming unit and sent commands to the receiver gyro assembly in the missile
by means of a joystick. The messages were carried to the missile from the joystick through thin wires that the missile extruded
as it traveled. The missile receiver-gyro interpreted these signals and activated spoilers on the fins to alter its path.
A flare assembly at the rear of the missile acted as a visual flight monitor.

Dartley examined the warhead. It seemed to have an armor-piercing combined with shrapnel purpose, which would be ideal. This
missile traveled at more than 150 mph and had a range of at least one mile. He couldn’t have asked for better, and wondered
again at the generosity of the French. He thought about test-firing one of the three missiles, but decided not to waste the
projectile. He might need all three of the missiles since he would be shooting at a moving target which might have sophisticated
defenses set up around it.

Dartley wasn’t sure what could defend anything from a Cobra 2000, except maybe an eighteen-inch-thick steel plate. And the
goddam Cobra warhead would probably bend that.

Richard Dartley and Aaron Gottlieb sat on a bench in a hotel beach garden. They sat back among the palms, bougainvillea, well-watered
flowers and grass, as if basking in the sun and enjoying the view out to sea. Occasional hotel guests passing by hardly gave
them a second glance. There was only one odd
touch—they were listening to Arabic on a transistor radio.

An elderly couple, very British, came along the path.

“Glorious day,” the man said to them.

It probably hadn’t rained in Aqaba for six months.

Their dog, a white terrier, lingered behind them, nosing in the bushes.

“Skippy! Skippy!” the woman called. It was plain that she had heard how Arabs hate dogs and was not letting little Skippy
out of her sight.

Dartley nudged Gottlieb.

Skippy was in a nearby bush, hind leg raised, urinating against the fins of a Cobra 2000 guided missile.

The woman came back to search for the dog. “Skippy! Here Skippy!”

Dartley’s hand slid inside his jacket.

The terrier finished with the missile and trotted back onto the path to answer the old lady’s calls.

Gottlieb eyed Dartley’s hand easing its grip on the Colt .45 automatic inside his jacket. He asked, “Would you have shot them?”

“If they had seen something and then refused to sit beside us and keep still, of course I’d have shot them. Be a kindness
to them both perhaps—sending them out together unexpectedly. Funny how something like a fucking little dog can easily cause
a thing like that.”

Gottlieb raised a hand for him to listen to the radio. After a while, the Israeli said, “You understood? The king has already
gone aboard his yacht. He left on a navy launch from the port area an hour ago. No word on Ahmed Hasan.”

“He won’t keep the king waiting too long for lunch.”

They looked at their watches—seven minutes to ten—and stirred on the bench under the increasingly intense rays of the sun.

Dartley was calm but tense. He had been up since dawn, and everything so far had gone smoothly. He had met Gottlieb at seven.
They had set up the three missiles in the shrubs and bushes of the hotel garden after eight, when Dartley had gotten hard
information from Michelle by phone that the Egyptian president’s only onshore function was to be photographed taking a swim
on Aqaba’s beach.

He was doing this to promote tourism to Aqaba, it was announced. Dartley wondered who the hell would want to visit a beach
because Ahmed Hasan had been there. These photos would be about as good an ad as if they’d invited Colonel Muammar al-Qaddifi
or Fidel Castro. Maybe the ads would go down big in Iran.

Michelle said a navy launch would pick Hasan up on the beach in front of the Coral Beach Hotel to take him in his swimming
trunks for lunch with the king aboard the royal yacht. Dartley and Gottlieb were down the beach a ways, beyond the ring of
tight security forming around the Coral Beach Hotel.

Dartley left Gottlieb to babysit the three missiles at nine and drove to the airport in the Peugeot. The English pilot was
with the Lear as promised. He was warming the engines up already and would be set to go in half an hour. On the way back to
the bench in the hotel beach garden, Dartley checked the location of the backup car. It was where Michelle said it
would be—two blocks from the beach, a blue Honda. Gottlieb had nothing to report when Dartley got back. Since then he had
been sitting in the sun, and nothing more serious had disturbed the peace than Skippy the terrier.

The Peugeot was fifty yards behind them, parked on the side of the road. The two men each packed a Colt .45 automatic. The
three guided missiles squatted on their fins in the bushes, their warheads pointing out to sea. All three were wired by separation
cables to a junction box, which in turn was connected to the aiming unit, hidden directly behind Dartley’s position on the
bench in a small bush with waxy green leaves and pinkish cream flowers.

All they could do was wait.

At 10:30 a motorcade arrived outside the Coral Beach Hotel. Ten minutes later, there was a lot of fuss on the beach, with
a helicopter hovering overhead. Then a big naval launch, with a heavy machine gun mounted on its foredeck, made its way across
the water to the beach.

Gottlieb nodded to Dartley in a satisfied way.

“Looks like an old converted torpedo boat,” Dartley said, staring out to sea at the launch. “She’ll be fast, but too heavy
to be maneuverable. Big enough to make a nice target, too.”

“Hasan must be having his swim for the photographers.” Gottlieb raised himself from the bench, casually stretched, and sat
down again. He lit a Kent. “Everything looks quiet here. I’ll head off anyone coming this way if I have to when the time comes.”

The launch had beached at the crowded area and they could no longer see it.

“I’d better get my stuff together,” Dartley said, reaching behind him and hauling out the aiming unit.

Two helicopters came over the water and joined the third one, still hovering over the beach. These choppers were gunships
with rocket pods, forward cannons and a side door machine gunner. Then the two choppers moved offshore again a few hundred
yards and waited. The launch left land and started out to sea toward an area where many big ships were anchored outside the
port facilities.

“Shit, I wish I’d asked Michelle for binoculars,” Dartley muttered, and peered over the dazzling waters at a figure standing
at the stern of the launch, waving toward the beach.

“I’m farsighted,” Gottlieb said. “That’s Ahmed Hasan.”

“I guess you’re right.”

The two choppers stayed over the launch as it went on its way. Sailboats and pleasure craft kept their distance.

Dartley peered through the optical sight on the control box. The battery power supply had been switched on. He would need
to be fast since the range was only about a quarter of a mile. He launched the first missile and it streaked off the ground
at a low angle and out over the sea toward the launch. He heard its sustainer motor in the rear section cut in and accelerate
the missile on its journey.

Dartley tracked the launch as target through the optical sight on the control box, while he kept the
missile in his line of sight and sent commands through its receiver gyro assembly by way of joystick control through the fine
wire the missile payed out behind it as it flew. Except the missile was not obeying him! It was rising steadily into the air
at a 20-degree angle, veering neither left nor right.

Dartley twisted the joystick violently around.

There was no response in the missile’s trajectory.

“Must be a fault in the wire,” Dartley hissed. “Or in the gyro. No knowing how much these fucking missiles have been bumped
around before we got them. I’m switching to the next one.”

Before Dartley got the second missile launched, the first one arced down, hit the seawater and sent a huge plume of spray
Skyward as it exploded at four or five times the distance of the launch.

They heard the thud of its hollow-charge warhead a few seconds later and saw figures on the launch run for cover. But not
Ahmed Hasan, who maintained his position at the stern of the craft. He did quit waving to the shore.

“Thinks he’s fucking de Gaulle,” Dartley grumbled as he released the second missile, which tore into the air with a blast
and screaming of air cut through by its fins.

This missile’s sustainer motor cut in without a hitch and accelerated it on its path.

Dartley sighted on the launch and eased the joystick forward.

Nothing happened. Like the last one, the missile continued on its gently angled, upward flight out over the sea.

Dartley moved the joystick again. Still nothing. He
yanked the lever about on the control box, but he might as well have been pointing his finger to the missile for all the good
it did.

“Goddam, I’m going to grab that rifle with the scope and see if I can use it to knock the bastard out of that boat.” Dartley
jumped to his feet and left the control box on the bench as he set out to run for the car in order to retrieve the rifle from
its trunk.

Gottlieb seized the control box and searched for the target in its optical sight. He adjusted the joystick hopefully before
launching the third missile.

Dartley had almost reached the road when he saw the chopper coming—not either of the two circling the launch, but the one
that had remained hovering over the beach. It was now bearing down on them like a bat out of hell. Dartley saw the orange
flashes from the guns in its nose.

“Get down! Chopper! Get down!” he yelled, to Gottlieb.

The Israeli kind of stirred as he gazed through the optical sight, like someone indicating he didn’t want to be disturbed
while on the phone. Dartley saw the last missile shoot into the air—and he knew from its initial seconds of flight that, like
the previous two, it was not responding to ground guidance.

The gunship caught the Israeli in the open, on the garden bench with the optical sight still to his eye and his right hand
desperately flicking the joystick about. Dartley was yelling at him, and his voice was suddenly drowned by the roar of the
chopper’s engine.

Dartley felt the wind of the main rotor on his face. He saw Gottlieb crumple and the control box fall
from his hands. He heard no gunfire over the sound of the engine, now almost directly over his head.

They had him too, if they wanted. They had seen him, standing there looking up at them. No point in his trying to hide now.
No point in trying to help Gottlieb, either. He would be beyond that. Those large-caliber chopper guns would have seen to
that.

The missile exploded far out at sea, and the helicopter veered away. Dartley started to walk. He hadn’t far to go—no more
than twenty yards to reach the gray Peugeot. The helicopter was still up there, hovering somewhere behind him—he did not look
back.

He was proud that his hand never shook as he slipped the key in the ignition. He saw now what the helicopter had been doing—looking
for a place to land in the garden. The pilot had found a spot where none of the trees and bushes were high enough to damage
the rotors and he was easing the craft down. Time for Dartley to move! Even if they did not immediately associate him with
the dead man on the bench who had fired the missiles, they would have questions for him about what he had seen. And that would
probably end badly….

The gray Peugeot went a couple of blocks inland, out of sight of the beach, and stopped behind a blue Honda. Dartley wanted
to dump the Peugeot fast because the helicopter crew had seen him get in it and also in case there were immediate car searches
after the unsuccessful attack on Ahmed Hasan. Two automatic rifles in the trunk was bad enough—but he had two Israeli rifles!

The door of the Honda was unlocked, as had been
agreed. The keys would be in the dashboard ashtray. Dartley pulled it out. No keys. He looked in the ignition. On the floor.

He did not waste time. He slammed the car door, headed back to the Peugeot and restarted it. He’d take his chances with it
at the airport.

The British pilot was at the Lear, standing in the shade of one wing. Dartley could see him through the glass as he waited
for the official to check his papers. They were handed back to him with a smile. Word of the missiles mustn’t have reached
the airport yet. It wouldn’t be long now.