Reprisal (23 page)

“I have the very thing for you here,” Omar said with the zeal of an Arab merchant showing a gullible tourist expensive trinkets
in a bazaar. “What I am about to show you is worth two, three times the value of my life.’

“A pack of cigarettes is worth that.”

Omar paused, alarmed again. “Now you are joking, Mr. Lewis. To Omar Zekri the life of Omar Zekri is worth pearls and diamonds
and barrels of fine old whiskey. Yet Omar Zekri admits that the value of his own precious life is exceeded by two of the objects
which he is about to show you.”

Omar unrolled the rug and held it up by two corners for Dartley to see the papers stapled to it. His fear had made him forget
his earlier caution. Before he left his apartment he had been afraid to be seen slipping papers to an American. Now he was
holding up a dirty rug with papers stapled to it—an odd enough sight to attract the interest of anyone who happened to be
in the little public park.

The Egyptian gently removed two of the papers, snapping away each corner so that the staple pulled through the paper and left
only a tiny tear.

Dartley gestured to the other papers.

“They are of minor interest,” Omar assured him. “These two are the gems of the collection.”

Dartly muttered threateningly, “If they turn out to be no good…”

“They will turn out to be so good that the next time you see me you will press bundles of dollars in my hands and tell me
I am your lifelong friend.”

Dartley grinned. “I have a hard time imagining that.” He folded the two papers, glancing at them before he put them in his
pocket. They seemed to be diagrams of clusters of buildings, labeled in Arabic handwriting. “What are you going to do to replace
them?”

“I have Xeroxes,” Omar said brightly.

Dartley left him on the park seat, rerolling the rug. He walked quickly, pausing suddenly at store windows and crossing streets
unexpectedly, reconnoitering for a tail.

He had snapped on the plastic cap and flipped the aspirin bottle of water in a garbage can.

Dartley phoned the number Aaron Gottlieb had given him. Again he heard the shouting and crashing of crockery. It might be
the kitchen of a busy restaurant or a factory in which they made something that clattered like plates under chaotic conditions.
He raised his voice so the man at the other end of the line could hear him.

“I want to speak to the boss’s nephew.” He spoke in simple colloquial Arabic.

“Maalesh.” The code reply. Meaning don’t bother.

The man hung up.

Dartley headed for the cafe in the New City. He wondered whether he should sit in the cafe this time since he would not recognize
the person he was meeting, or whether he should do what he had done before—sit out of sight in the cafe across the street
and observe what went on. Maybe the Israelis were furious with him for having caused the loss of their agent. His opening
line over the phone about wanting to speak to the boss’s nephew presumably identified him, each contact being given a different
code. Instead of coming to talk this time, the Israelis might send a couple of heavies to spray the cafe with Uzis. A seat
out of sight across the street was definitely indicated.

Or maybe not. Gottlieb would have reported that this was where he met him rather than at the agreed upon rendezvous. To hide
across the street was what they would expect him to do, and any professional assassin with a yen to survive did not do what
people expected him to do.

He could not properly size up the situation by walking past the cafe periodically because it would mean he would not have
the cafe in sight all the time. So he hired a taxi, bought a magazine for the driver and told him he might have to wait an
hour. The man was willing, drove to the appointed place and parked the taxi where Dartley had a view of the two cafes on opposite
sides of the street.

From the moment he first saw her, Dartley figured she was his contact. She was tall, with jet black hair piled on her head
in loose waves, and had a narrow face and pointed chin. He could not tell much more from the distance at which he sat inside
the cab. He
hung back a while and watched her select a table and order a coffee from the waiter in the cafe in which they were supposed
to meet, not in the one across the street where he and Gottlieb had run into one another.

Why had they sent a pretty woman? It was not unusual in Cairo to see a woman enter a cafe by herself. The mullahs had not
managed yet to deprive Egyptian women of their relative independence, although their publicly announced goal was to install
every grown female in a shapeless black chador. This woman was dressed in a pantsuit which modestly concealed whatever bodily
charms she possessed.

Dartley paid off the driver and approached her. He had no prearranged signal to exchange with her and so tried his telephone
code again.

“I want to speak to the boss’s nephew.”

“Maalesh.” She gestured to a seat at her table.

Dartley ordered a Turkish coffee from the waiter. They observed each other wordlessly until after it was served. This lady
was tough. She wasn’t yielding an inch. And she had an amused look in her big brown eyes, almost as if she half expected him
to ask her if she came here often.

Dartley placed his folded copy of the
Egyptian Gazette
on the table. “There’s a handwritten account here of what happened to Aaron Gottlieb. I’m sorry about how it ended.”

“We understand.”

He had given them all the details, including his suspicions of Michelle Perret’s treachery. Let her explain things to some
mean Israelis. She could tell
them how she wanted him killed, not the Mossad agent.

“There are two documents—maps—of what seem to be nuclear facilities. I got them from what I think is a reliable source, Omar
Zekri is his name, but he’s off to paddle them around town. If you want to make use of them on an exclusive basis, you’re
going to have to act fast.”

“I’ll see that they get top priority,” she said coolly.

“There’s also a photo of me. I need an American passport.”

“No problem.”

“That’s it then,” Dartley said. He had made sure that the photo, like the previous one he had given Aaron Gottlieb, was of
poor quality and showed him with an uncharacteristic expression on his face, a photo that was definitely of him when compared
to his living face by some official, but one of little use in a file for future identification purposes.

“Tonight, about midnight, at the bar of the Marriott.” She gave him a quick smile, picked up the newspaper, and was gone.

Mustafa Bakkush returned from the airstrip to the flat-roofed military hut in which he, his wife, two daughters and son lived.
The hut was in an abandoned air force base in the middle of the Western Desert, halfway between the Nile and the Libyan border,
distant from all Bedouin camel routes. He kept Aziza and the children with him in the wilderness for their own safety, although
her well-to-do family at Aswan had pleaded that they stay with them until Mustafa’s project was finished. Mustafa could not
tell them his
project would never be finished, because he would not let it be finished, regardless of the consequences to him. But that
still lay in the future and while he could he wanted to have his family near him so he could protect them and enjoy their
company. Aziza naturally resented his frequent trips to Cairo while she remained confined on a military base in the hot, dry,
endless desert, but the memory of her and the children’s abduction from London in crates was still fresh enough in her mind
to make her see the sense of her husband’s course of action. What he did not tell her was that he would find a way out of
Egypt for her and his children before he did whatever he had to do to prevent Ahmed Hasan from possessing an atom bomb.

It had been a long, hot day, and his family sat in camp chairs in the shade of the hut, sipping tea. Mustafa had brought a
plastic bag of ice cubes which the children squabbled over, spilling some of the precious objects onto the sand at their feet.

Mustafa chatted with them as they watched the sun sink in blazing red and gold over the empty wastes of sand. But though he
smiled and joined in the children’s games and told his wife the latest gossip from the capital, he felt weighted down by a
slow burning rage. This was not merely a resentment at his present lot in life or an unfocused bitterness. It was a strong
personal hatred of Ahmed Hasan that grew mightily every day, so that it was almost a living, moving part of him, real, like
his blood except that it was poisoning his mind rather than sustaining him. Would he go mad? Maybe. But first he had to get
his family out.

He looked toward the airstrip in the setting sun. Some cargo planes and a few fighters were on the concrete expanse before
the terminal building and control tower. Scientists, technicians and pilots lived in other huts, but most were empty. As few
personnel as possible were stationed at this base.

Someone who didn’t know the place could easily have dismissed, even at close range, the sandy swelling in the ground among
the huts as a desert dune. Most of the vast concrete dome was underground. Sand had been bulldozed as a fortification around
much of the dome that protruded aboveground. From the air, not even the swelling of the land surface was visible.

Beneath the huge, brown, dusty concrete dome, a nuclear reactor processed its uranium fuel into plutonium and other products.
Next to it a chemical extraction unit separated the plutonium from the other products. In a lead-lined concrete cistern sunk
deep in the sand, the deadly fruit of this harvest was gathered and stored.

This had been one of Ahmed Hasan’s nasty surprises for Mustafa Bakkush. The physicist had expected to work with Egypt’s known
nuclear reactors which were subject to international inspection. Whatever cheating that might have gone on at these reactors
would have been on a reasonably modest scale and at a fairly slow rate, because of the necessity of accounting for fuel and
interruptions for inspections. This secret reactor changed all that. Here everything went toward producing plutonium. In addition,
the other reactors were doing their share as had been planned for them. It would not be so long after all
until Ahmed Hasan had the radioactive material for his bomb.

Mustafa saw he could not interfere easily with this stage of the process. He would strike at Hasan later. For example, a faulty
bomb design would use up time, parts, and fuel.…

The children heard them first. They saw nothing until the planes were almost on top of them because the aircraft flew with
the setting sun behind them. First one aircraft swooped low. Antiaircraft guns followed it. Seconds later, eight more planes
swooped in, dropping long cylinders, almost a third of each plane’s length, onto the concrete dome.

Mustafa understood what he was seeing. The pilots carefully aimed their bombs at the dome so they would not bounce the bombs
off the concrete. The first bombs had delayed explosive impact so that they sank into the concrete through their falling weight
before exploding.

The first bombs, dropped by four planes, lifted great chunks of thick concrete out of the dome. The second four planes swept
in out of the setting sun and dropped their bombs through the holes made by the first! Mustafa had seen and read of many bombing
techniques, but he had never thought such precision and accuracy possible.

The explosions were now deep beneath the dome, destroying everything the giant shell had been built to protect. Great orange
billows of flame shot out of the ruptures and cracks in the fiery egg.

The green-brown camouflaged jets had disappeared, streaking low across the desert.

“There may be fallout,” Mustafa warned and
shepherded his family inside the hut. He sealed the doors and windows.

His five-year-old son cheered and clapped his hands at the raging inferno visible through the shattered concrete dome.

He asked, “Can we go home now?”

Three hours later, Dr. Mustafa Bakkush was at the Citadel. They had come to the hut for him with a protective suit and flown
him in a high-speed jet fighter to Cairo. A military car rushed him from the airport to the courtyard within the Citadel where
not so long ago he had seen men executed and saved the life of a rebellious engineer. Maybe this time Ahmed Hasan wanted his
head.

The scientist passed beneath the stony stares of soldiers who looked as if they might know something he did not. Mustafa pulled
himself together. For better or worse, he would defend himself against all accusations. If there was slaughter, he was not
going to be led to it as a silent lamb.

A high-placed civil servant whom Mustafa recognized stood outside a pair of large double doors inside a building in the Citadel.
Mustafa knew what lay beyond them. In there was the hearing room in which he had tried to explain nuclear weapons to the contemptuous
Light of Islam mullahs.

The civil servant nodded to Mustafa’s military escort and they marched back along the corridor.

The government man paused before he turned the handle of one door and murmured, “Be careful.”

Mustafa nodded gratefully and went in.

To his relief, he was not facing a row of fierce,
bearded mullahs. Only a few were present. Ahmed Hasan sat at the opposite side of the long table. A number of uniformed military
men Stood in a row in front of him, with several paces between each of them, as if they were each trying to disassociate themselves
from the others.

Mustafa joined them, making sure not to get too close to them, but deriving a certain comfort, all the same, in not being
out there all by himself in front of Ahmed Hasan.

The president did not acknowledge Bakkush’s presence. He went on shouting at one of the military men.

“Tell me how—
how
—nine Zionist planes, one F-15 and eight F-16s, could reach that location deep in our air space without alerting our air defenses?”

“They fooled the radar, sir, by flying in tight formation so they looked like a large commercial airliner on the screens.
When challenged, one pilot identified himself as a Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747 en route from Riyadh to New York. The
radar image was on the correct flight path and moving at the right speed, and the call numbers and identification data checked
out. There was no air or ground visual contact reported to contradict what seemed to the radar operators to be a routine flight.
I can’t fault them. They followed procedure. We have a weakness in our system.”