Reprisal (2 page)

He was still shouting when his words were drowned out by a roaring flash inside the house. The gendarme knew immediately what
it was—an incendiary device, not explosives. He went in the open window and saw the staircase was in a sea of flames. The
heat was intense, and the old timbers crackled like fireworks as the building started to burn. Dense smoke billowed everywhere,
choking and blinding him.

Why hadn’t they come to an upstairs window and jumped? Perhaps they had while he was inside the
house searching for them. To see if he could get upstairs that way, he forged through the dense smoke into the front room,
keeping his face next to the wall when he took a breath to make use of the thin layer of untainted air that always lay between
smoke and a surface. He saw her on the floor of the room, lying facedown.

When he reached her, he saw her husband was lying not far away. They must have come downstairs just before the incendiary
went off and been knocked unconscious by its force. A wall had protected them from being burned.

The gendarme slumped the woman over his right shoulder in a fireman’s lift which kept his left hand free. He made for one
of the closed windows in the room, then thought better of it. A window opened at this stage could feed the blaze a jet of
oxygen which could explode the house in a fireball. He made his way back to the window he had enteted in the back of the house,
guessing he would never have time to come back for the man.

By the time he climbed through the window with his burden, laid her on the ground a safe distance from the house and returned,
the whole interior of the ground floor was a raging inferno. He ran to the front of the house to see if he could get in a
window there, but the room where he had found the woman was bright with flames. Her husband would be dead already.

She was on her feet when he got back, moving unsteadily and saying something over and over again in Arabic.

“I’m sorry, madame, I could not reach your husband. It was too late.”

She stared at him as if he had said something so obscene to her she did not know how to react.

He went on gently, “We can’t do anything now. I will take you into town where you will be looked after.”

“My child! My husband!” she shouted in French and rushed toward the flaming house.

The gendarme caught up with her and stopped her from leaping through the fragmented glass of a window into the furnacelike
interior.

“I want to die! Kill me! Let me die!” She beat desperately on his head with her small fists as he carried her, struggling,
to the Citroen.

Keegan looked up from his desk at the State Department in Washington, D.C., and nodded to the Secret Service agent who entered
his office.

“You’re bright and early today, sir,” the agent said.

“Early, but not so bright. It’s never good news that brings me in early.”

The agent went directly to the telephone scrambler in one corner of the office. The KYX scrambler was a big metal box, and
the combination lock in its front made it look like a safe. The Secret Service man unlocked it and replaced an IBM punched
card in it with a new one bearing the day’s code. He left without another word.

Keegan glance at the off-green telephone connected by wires to the scrambler. It was only 7:30
A.M.
The call from Paris was not due for another hour. He went back to his paperwork.

The call came through on time.

“Paris embassy. That you, John? Is the line safe?”

“Go ahead, Christmas Tree,” Keegan said.

“Same shit today, John. Things as they stand now are like this: We’ve intercepted messages from the Israelis making open threats
to the French of destroying the nuclear reactors the French are building in Egypt. The French seem to care only about the
insolence of the threats, although they did put a mildly worded question to the Egytians on whether they might be making an
atom bomb. The Egyptians, of course, denied it, and claimed that if the Zionist entity bombed their peaceful reactors, they’d
launch missiles from the Sinai onto Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The Israelis intercepted that message and told the French they
were ready to nuke Cairo. All it would take was one Egyptian missile on Israeli soil and it was ashes-to-ashes and dust-to-dust.
You following me?”

“Loud and clear, Christmas Tree,” Keegan said, although the voice at the other end of the line sounded as if it were coming
through a long tube. “You think they’d do it?”

“If you were in Cairo, would you order a missile to hit Tel Aviv?”

“No. But then I’m not a fundamentalist, Christian or Islamic. Tell me more, Christmas Tree.”

“Big news is the French have continued to pull out their experts from Egypt. I’m pretty sure it’s in direct reply to Washington’s
accusation of Paris being responsible for nuclear proliferation. When you people said equipment and fuel supplies might be
effected, the French began to hear what you were saying. The Egyptians are trying to lure back their own technicians
who fled when the mullahs took over, but so far they don’t seem to be succeeding. Enough of the French technicians have left
already to slow things down considerably. You might put this forcibly to the Israelis as a reason for them to delay any strike
they might have in mind against the Egyptian reactors.”

They went on to talk of other things.

The AirEgypt turboprop cargo plane touched down on the runway at Cairo International Airport. Two army Range Rovers waited
at the cargo terminal, and an officer and four soldiers watched the ground crew set up to unload the aircraft. The temperature
was in the high sixties, a sunny, pleasant October day, after a scorching summer that had made the asphalt runways and air
laced with jet fuel fumes a more hellish place than any to be found in the Libyan Desert.

The officer climbed the ramp and pointed out two plywood crates, each about four feet square, marked London-Cairo/Al-Qahira
with red serial numbers. He double-checked the numbers against those on a clipboard and shouted at the workers to handle the
crates carefully because they contained sensitive, high explosives. The soldiers laughed and the workers grinned nervously.

They set the crates down gently on a small flatbed wagon attached to a miniature tractor, which towed them into a customs
shed cordoned off by ropes. Paper signs dangling from the ropes read in Arabic and English:
MILITARY INSTALLATION
—
KEEP OUT.
The soldiers lifted the crates from the wagon and waited for the driver to leave the shed before they set about
tearing open the crates. A bald man in civilian clothes took a stethoscope from his jacket pocket.

Inside the first crate were huddled a woman and a boy about five. The soldiers stretched them on their backs on the concrete
floor. The doctor kneeled over each of them in turn to listen to their breathing, feel their pulse, lift an eyelid, look inside
the mouth and place the stethoscope on the chest. He grunted and moved on to the next pair, two girls about seven and nine,
obviously sisters.

When he rose to his feet, the doctor gave the officer a severe look. “I don’t think much of this method. These people are
fortunate to be alive. They should come out from under the effects of the drug in five hours or so. They’ll be feeling groggy
and nauseous for a while after that. Whose idea was this?”

The officer raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Not the Army’s.”

“I thought not. Well, you can tell whoever did think it up that, in my professional opinion—”

The officer gestured to the doctor to lower his voice and led him out of earshot of the four soldiers.

A cold drizzle fell on Cambridgeshire. The small, spare Egyptian physicist made his way through the centuries-old quadrangles
of Cambridge University without a coat, seemingly heedless of the weather. He drew an occasional amused glance from students,
who dismissed him as an absentminded prof for whom a raw October day was merely meteorological data.

But Dr. Mustafa Bakkush was not absentminded or
eccentric. He was in the middle of an emotional crisis so violent he was oblivious to his rain-soaked shirt, jacket and pants.
He walked through deep puddles among the paving stones without seeing them or feeling the water spill into his shoes.

When he reached the research building, he walked past his lab door and on down the corridor to the director’s office. Ponsonby
was sitting behind his desk in his white lab coat, shaking his head slowly at a plastic model of a nuclear structure.

“We’ve got it wrong somewhere, Mustafa,” he said without looking up, “and I’m damned if I know where.”

Mustafa Bakkush was not deflected from his purpose. “Gordon, I want to resign. Immediately.”

Gordon Ponsonby’s eyebrows shot up. “Dammit, man, you just got here. You can’t walk out on us like that.”

“I have to.” Mustafa sat on the edge of an upright chair, small, wet, cold, miserable.

Ponsonby stared at him. “Been on a bender, old boy? You look like something the cat brought in.”

“Gordon, they tell me I’ve got to go.”

“For God’s sake, who? Buck up, man. Out with it. Those bloody Americans? They have no money for physics these days—don’t believe
a word they tell you. The Germans?”

“Home. Egypt.”

Ponsonby was flabbergasted. “But the mullahs denounced you personally as a decadent Westerner. Who knows what would have happened
if you and your family hadn’t reached our embassy in time? And remember the fuss we had to smuggle you all out?
Now, hardly a year later, you walk into my office, looking as if you stopped to immerse yourself in the river on the way,
and announce you want to go back. Homesick for the pyramids, I suppose.”

“Gordon, I don’t
want
to go back. I have to. They have Aziza and the children.”

Bakkush told the director of the phone calls he had been receiving, culminating in the disappearance of his wife and children
four days previously.

“You didn’t go to the police?”

“The man on the telephone warned me not to. He said they would not be harmed if I kept quiet. I knew he was an Egyptian and
not an ordinary criminal. This morning I received a phone call a little after five. He gave me a Cairo number and told me
to phone it. It took more than an hour to get through. I asked for Aziza. She came to the phone and told me they were all
safe and well. They allowed her to tell me what happened. Men came to the house with two crates. They put them in the garage,
saying they were scientific equipment I had ordered. She could see they were Egyptian, and they explained that by saying I
had contacted them because they were fellow countrymen and needed the work. They managed to delay until all the children were
in the house, then they chloroformed everyone with a cloth over their faces. After that they must have injected them with
a powerful drug and put them in the crates. Aziza overheard one man say they had been shipped out of Gatwick on a cargo plane.”

“Gatwick! Good God, what’s Britain coming to!”

“Much as I dread going back there, for Aziza and the children’s sakes I have to.”

“Yes, yes, of course you must. What rotten luck. We’ll keep the journals open to you and expect to see you at conventions
and so forth….”

Mustafa shook his head. “I won’t be working on the cutting edge of physics when I go back to Egypt, Gordon. They have a program
I suspect they need me for, one that’s become past history in more technically advanced countries.”

Ponsonby averted his eyes. “When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Good luck.”

There was nothing more to say. After Bakkush left his office, Ponsonby pressed the intercom to his secretary in an alcove
farther down the corridor. “Mrs. Arthurs, I have to go to London today. What time’s the next train?”

He held the phone in his left hand, and with his right removed a cassette from the tape deck concealed beneath a desk drawer.

John Keegan sat in the office of his State Department superior, F. Conrad Bigglesley. Like Keegan, he was a Princeton man
and they got on well.

“Defense has gone too far this time,” Bigglesley expostulated, his eyes bulging with indignation. “That whole department’s
developed a complex since Vietnam—it’s like having to work with an emotionally disturbed person.”

Keegan nodded. “They’re always trying to play it too safe or too dangerously, never the happy medium. This time though, I
think the CIA may be more to blame than the Department of Defense.”

“It’s Defense, with Treasury doing Defense’s bidding. You don’t see the whole picture, John.”

“Maybe not.”

That pacified Bigglesley enough to acknowledge Keegan’s point.
“
I grant you this stuff is not coming from military intelligence. But neither is it originating with the CIA. They’re just
acting as messengers. And you know who for? Right. God’s chosen people, our friends the Israelis. They and Defense are hand
in glove. It’s a known fact. Despite all our diplomatic work to ease tensions in the area, despite our numerous successes,
our department gets little credit. You ask why. I answer, because peaceful discussion is less dramatic than violent confrontation.
Don’t you agree, John?”

“Absolutely, Conrad.”

“That’s what Defense relies on all the time—good publicity. They have no interest in settling things behind closed doors or
in using the diplomatic touch—all they want is some playground stunt that will make them look good on the tube.”

“You never said a truer word.”

Bigglesley’s indignation had subsided and he was now looking more pleased with himself. “Let me sum up our viewpoint for you.
Ahmed Hasan is no angel. We’d prefer to have Mubarak back in power any day, but Hasan is a reality, and we can’t get around
that. If Hasan is deposed as president of Egypt, you’ll almost certainly have one of those Light of Islam mullahs replacing
him. Our friends in Defense and the CIA claim none of the mullahs could be any worse than Ahmed Hasan—that’s what Israel wants
us to believe. That’s the whole ploy, you see?”

Keegan nodded. “If Israel can maneuver another Khomeini into power in Egypt, we will break relations with them and be all
the more dependent on Israel.”