Final Flight (28 page)

He changed positions, surprised at how
alive and vigorous he felt. He would not die.
Even if he did, he was vibrantly alive now,
aware of very thing, a part of the universe.

When he looked again over the lip of the rock, he
could see the hobbled amel in the sandy bed of the wadi,
which was lined with boulders larger than a tent. There were
four camels. He gently eased the rifle forward
and umbed off the safety.

He saw a head searching again for him. He lined
up the Enfield and tried quell his rapid breathing.
The rifle fired before he was ready. The weapon
s1ammed back against his shoulder. He crawled
backward way from the barrel of the heavy rifle
dragging against the rock.

“You are surrounded.”" His uncle was shouting.
“Lay down your rifles and step out and you will live.
Allah is mercifiil”

“We have the water.”

The voice was high pitched a boy voice.
“Surrender or die.”" “You will kill us anyway.”

“I swear by the Prophet. If you surrender, you
live.” Qazi crawled back to the edge and looked
down. “As Allah wills it, “the boy said
barely audible. He and his companion stepped from behind
the rocks. Only one of them had a rifle. He
tossed it on ground before them.

“I don’t think anyone is coming, Colonel,”
Ali said. “Perhaps later, Relieve the men on the
roofs when you relieve the perimeter guards.”

This was done every two hours.

“Who could it have been?”

“Anybody,” Qazi shrugged. “Even curious
neighbors.” He glanced at his watch. It was
three-thirty. He stood and picked up the radio
on the table. “I am going upstairs to sleep.
Wake me at five o’clock. Put only men who are
not going with us on guard duty. All the others should
meet in the dining room at five for a briefing.

Jake threw the telephone receiver onto its
cradle with a bang. “The whole damned afternoon wasted,
all because of him!”

“Now, Jake,” Callie said, “don’t be
nasty. It’s not Toad’s fault.” They had ridden
the same ferry back from Capri that they had ridden
over, and Jake had stopped by fleet landing and talked
to the ship by radio. He had spoken to the XO,
Ray Reynolds, and told him of Callie’s
suspicions about Judith Farrell, Lieutenant
Tarkington’s new flame. He had left word that
Toad was to personally call Captain Grafton
at his hotel.

And Jake had asked to be telephoned when
Lieutenant Tarkington was located.

In the lobby the Graftons had telephoned
Judith Farrell’s room, but no one answered.
They had even gone to the fourth floor and knocked on
the door. All to no avail.

“They say he isn’t aboard. They’ve just
figured out that he had liberty all day and cycled
through the ready room at ten o’clock, on his way ashore
again. No one knows where he is.”

“How about the Shore Patrol?”

“Reynolds has already alerted them. If they
run across him, they’re to secure his liberty and send
him back to the ship immediately, after he calls me.”

“Surely you don’t think Judith is behind the
disappearance of those petty officers?”

“I don’t know what to think. Goddammit, I
don’t have enough facts to do any thinking with. Sailors
are over the hill. Sailors go over the hill all
the time when the ship is in port. The captain has a
big mast when we get underway and kicks a lot of
kids butts for overstaying liberty.

But petty officers rarely do that. And Judith
has a funny accent-a faint, funny accent that
only a linguist can hear. She’s not what
she says she is and she’s not in her room and she was
aboard the ship in Tangiers. And Toad can’t be
immediately located.

“So what does it all add up to?”

“Nothing.”

“Maybe. Or it may mean Judith has been
a part of a ring kidnapping American sailors.
Maybe she’s a terrorist. Toad could be her
next victim. Maybe she just has a speech
impediment. Or that pussy-hound Tarkington may have
her flat on her back this very minute and be fucking
her silly. Goddamn if I know.” He threw
himself into a chair.

“So what do we do next?”

“I’m all out of ideas. What do you suggest?”
Callie stood and examined herself in the full-length
mirror on the back of the door. She tucked in a
stray lock of hair. “Well, let’s go have a
drink someplace and contemplate where we’ll go for
dinner.”

“Leave Toad to his horrible fate, huh?”

“You’ve done all you can. But at heart Judith
is a very nice young woman and Toad is a nice
young man. I’m sure it’ll all work out.”

“Aaaahg! Women! Why don’t you
panic like you’re supposed to?” She grinned at
him. “How men ever managed to keep women from running
the world, I’ll never know.” Jake grabbed the room
key from the desk.

“Com’on, I’m tired of sitting around the
hotel.”

As he stabbed the button for the elevator, Jake
muttered, “The whole afternoon down the tube. By God,
I hope that horny bastard catches the clap.”

“Jacob Lee Grafton! You do not! Now
calm down and stop that cussing!”

TOAD TARKINGTON sat at the bar of the
Vittorio and watched the desk in the lobby
reflected in the mirror. He had sipped his way
through two slow beers and now a third beer sat
untouched on the table before him.

He was hungry and tired and discouraged. Maybe
she would never come.

But why hadn’t she checked out of her room?
Sooner or later she had to come to that desk and ask for
messages or check out.

Behind him a crowd was gathering. It looked like a
wedding reception.

Men in formal dress and women in sharp fashions
gathered around a table of hors d’oeuvres
against the back wall. The bartender passed drinks
across the counter to the lively crowd. The volume was
rising. Toad didn’t understand a word of it.
Couples entering the lounge kept obscuring his
view, but he kept his eyes on the mirror anyway.

When he could stand it no longer, he used the house
phone on the end of the bar and dialed her room. Perhaps
she had come in the back way, avoiding the lobby.
He let it ring ten times before he hung up and
returned to the bar.

And then she was there, against the lobby counter, looking
at the key boxes behind the desk and glancing at the
clerk. Toad stood quickly, then eased back
into his seat.

Let her read the letter first, he decided. He had
spent two hours this afternoon writing and rewriting the
two pages, two long hours devoted to the most
important letter of his life. The letter said the things that
he had never been able to say-had never before wanted
to say-to any woman. She should read it first, he
concluded, trying to quell his feeling of unease.

She spoke to the clerk and he handed her the
envelope. She looked at both sides of the
envelope carefully, glanced around the
lobby-her gaze even passed over the people going into the
bar before she opened it with a thumbnail.

Her hair was piled carelessly on top of her
head. Even at this distance Toad could see stray
locks. She was wearing a nondescript dark
jersey, a modest skirt, and flat shoes. A
large purse hung on a strap over one shoulder.

He watched her face expectantly as she
read. Her expression never changed. Her eyes
swept the crowd again and returned to the letter. As she
finished the first page her attention was back on the
crowd. She scanned the second page. Now she was
folding the pages and replacing them in the envelope,
now looking at the envelope, now tapping it against her
hand as she searched the faces of the wedding guests.

He stepped into the doorway and she saw him.
Toad started toward her only to hear the barman’s
shout. He fumbled in his pocket and found some
bills. He threw a wad on the bar and crossed the
lobby toward her.

“Judith, I.

“Hello, Robert.” Her features softened.
“I’ll keep this,” she said and tucked the envelope
into her purse. “Hey, uh. . .,” He couldn’t
think of anything to say and yet he new he
should be saying the most important things he had ever
said. “Listen. .

But she was looking away, her eyes tense and
expectant. Toad followed her gaze. A lean
man with stringy blond hair and carryng a
backpack was standing in the door that led to the rear
courtyard and looking at her.

“I have to go, Robert. You are very, very kind.”

“At least give me your phone number, your
address. I’ll. . “Not now, Robert. Later.”
She was moving toward the courtyard door and he was
moving with her. She put a hand on his chest. “No,
Robert. Please,” she said firmly. He stopped
dead. She bussed his cheek and disappeared through the
door.

He stood stock still, unsure of what had
happened. She had read the letter. She knew he
loved her. He looked around the lobby, at the
starkly modern designer furniture, the
second-floor balcony, the artsy chandeliers, the
bright green drapes, the anonymous dressed-up people
coming and going”. Of course she didn’t love him,
but she had to give it a chance. Then he knew. There
was another man-a husband or a lover.

Oh Christ, he had never even considered
that possibility.

He turned and walked down the hall toward the
rear courtyard, hurrying.

There was someone lying in the courtyard. Toad
froze in the doorway.

Judith and the man with the backpack stood over the
prone figure. And there was another man, one wearing
a workman’s shirt and cap, with a tool case at his
feet. He had something cradled in his hands. In the
semidarkness it was hard to see. The workman used his
foot to turn the body over.

“That isn’t him,” Judith said softly, her
voice carrying very well within this enclosure.

“Uh-uh.”

“Well, who is it?” Her voice was tense.

“It’s Sakol,” the workman said in a flat, American Midwest
voice.

“We’ve been after him for a long time. I had to do
it.”

“You fool,” she said fiercely. She took an
object from her purse and spoke into it. “Everyone
inside. Hit the door. Now.” She dashed toward
the entrance to the other wing of rooms. As she went under
the dim entryway bulb, Toad saw that she was
carrying a pistol. The two men were right behind
her. Now Toad could see what it was that the workman
carried at high port-a submachine gun.

Toad crossed the courtyard and stared at the man
lying on the stones.

He was on his back now, eyes and mouth open, a
wicked bruise on his cheekbone. Little circles of
blood stained his shirt around five holes in his
chest. The holes were neat and precise, stitched
evenly from armpit to armpit.

God Damn! Holy Mother of Christ!

He heard muffled, stuttering coughs and the sounds of
shattering glass and splintering wood.

A distant shout: “He’s on the roof.”

Pounding footsteps clattered on the stairway that
Judith had gone up.

She came flying out, followed by the man with the
backpack. He had a submachine gun in his hands
and the fat barrel pointed straight at Toad as he
moved.

She ran toward the corridor to the lobby. “Get
out of here,” she hissed at him and the man with her
gestured unmistakably with his weapon.

Someone three or four stories up, inside the
hotel, was shouting in Italian. Cursing, probably.

Toad looked again at the dead man at his feet.
This was the first body he had ever seen that wasn’t in a
casket. He found himself being drawn toward the lobby
inexorably, almost against his will.

The lobby was full of people. A young woman in a
white formal gown was wending her way toward the bar,
acknowledging the applause and handshakes. Her new
husband, wearing a tux, followed at her elbow,
shaking hands with the men and kissing the women.

The blond man was bending over near a large
potted fern. His backpack lay on the floor
near him, by his right hand. Toad looked for
Judith.

She was behind a group near the elevators, watching
the floor indicators above the stainless-steel doors.

The workman faced the elevators, his submachine
gun pressed against his leg.

For the love of”

“Look out!” Toad roared. “He’s got a
gun!” Startled faces turned toward him.

Toad pointed. ” ‘He’s got a gun!”

Women screamed and the crowd surged away from the
gunman.

The elevator door opened.

The blond man had the butt of the weapon braced
against his hip, spent cartridges flying out. The sound
of shattering glass from the elevator was audible, and a
low ripping noise and the screams and shouts of the
panicked crowd, some of whom were on the floor and some
of whom were trying to flee, shoving and pushing and
sprawling over those lying on the carpet. The gunman
fired one more burst, picked up his backpack, and
ran for the courtyard corridor.

Something hard was pressed against Toad’s back.
“Follow him,” Judith ordered, and pushed him
toward the archway. Over his shoulder Toad could see
a bloody body lying half-in, half-out of the
elevator. The bride stood horrified in the
middle of the lobby, staring at the body being crushed by the
closing doors of the elevator. A woman somewhere was
screaming.

“Quickly,” Judith urged.

They were in the corridor. She pushed him hard.
“Run.” She had a pistol in her hand. It had a
long, black silencer on the barrel as big as a
sausage. Even in the dim light Toad could see
the hole in the end pointed at him. He ran.

At the street entrance to the courtyard, men carrying
weapons were racing toward them, at least four
of them. A van careened around a corner and screeched
to a stop.

As the men piled in the back Judith shouted,
“Him, too.” Someone grabbed Toad and hurled him
toward the van. He was thrust face down onto the
floor and a heavy foot planted itself on the back of
his neck.

The van accelerated at full throttle for
fifty feet, then the engine noise dropped. “You
asshole,” someone said loudly. “You killed the
wrong man. You blew it, fucker!” Three or
four of them began talking at once.

“Silence!” It was a command. Judith’s voice.
He could smell the sweat and hear them breathing hard
over the street noises and the eternal quacking of
automobile and motor-scooter horns. He could
hear the distinctive clicks and hisses of a
two-way radio conversation, muted, from the front of the
vehicle, the voices low and indistinct. He
concentrated on the tinny voice from the speaker and
concluded it was a foreign language, one he
didn’t recognize. Cutting through all the noises
was the distant, two-tone panic wail of a siren.
Two sirens, moaning out of sync.

He could tell from the road noises, the
short accelerations and brake applications, that the van
was cruising in traffic. Time passed. How much
Toad didn’t know. The sirens eventually became
inaudible.

When he felt his legs cramping and he could stand it
no longer, he said, in as conversational a tone of
voice as he could muster, “Take your foot off my
neck, please.”

The pressure increased. He raised his voice,
“I asked you nice. Take your fucking foot off
my neck!”

“Okay, let him up.” Judith’s voice.

“He’ll see our faces.” It was the flat,
American Midwest voice. “He ought to see
yours.” Another male voice. This was a heavy
accent, perhaps Eastern European. “You agency
assholes want to be included, then you fuck it
up.

“Shut up, everyone,” Judith said. “Let him
up.” He was pulled bodily toward the rear of the
van and turned into a sitting position. Hands seized
his face. They were Judith’s hands.

Her face was only inches from his. “Don’t
look around.”

The light came through the back windows of the
vehicle headlight glare and occasional
streetlights. Her eyes held his as the lights
came and went. They were the most intelligent, understanding
eyes he had ever seen.

“Don’t ever tell anyone what you’ve seen or
heard. Promise me! Not a word.”

Her eyes held him. “Oh, Judith! Why you?”

“If you tell, people will die. Not you. Other people.
Good people.”

“You?”

“Perhaps.”

“I don’t even know your real name.”

“Don’t tell,” she whispered fiercely and
increased the pressure of her hands on his temples.
“I love you.”

The van came to a halt and the rear door opened.
“Get out.” As he did so” he heard her say,
“I’ll keep the letter.”

The van accelerated into traffic. He was beside a
pedestrian zsland in the middle of a vast piazza.
Buses were parked in rows cross the street from him.
To his right was the central train station, easily
recognizable with the black triangles on the low,
roof. He was in the Piazza Garibaldi.

Then he remembered that he should have looked at the
license number on the van.

He put his hand in his pockets and began shuffling
along.

Jake and Callie were having dinner in a
storefront trattoria on the Via Santa Lucia
famous among U.s. Sixth Fleet sailors.
Patches covered three large mirrors in the crowded
dining room. The floor was linoleum and round bulb
lamps hung from ceiling. Pictures of American
ships and airplanes in cheap frames adorned
the dingy wallpaper. Two men in their served the
noisy customers at the fifteen tables.

An Italian couple at the next table was
slaughtering a pizza demonstrating the proper use
of the knife and fork on this cacy to their daughter, who was
about eight. The utensils used to roll up the
triangular slice until it looked like a
blintz, the fork was stabbed through it and the pizza roll
raised mouth, where one took a delicate bite from
one end. The youngster was having her troubles with the
technique. Red sauce and gooey cheese dribbled
down her chin.

The little brother was peeking at Jake. Jake
winked. The little boy averted his face, then
peeked again. Another wink. The little boy jerked
away, then inched back around very, very slowly and
grinned.

“Kids are great, aren’t they?” Jake remarked.
“Oh, you think so?”

“You know what I mean.

“Then you won’t mind if we adopt?” Jake
hitched himself up in his chair and stared at his wife who
sipped her wine and gazed innocently around the room
with a trace of a smile on her lips, her eyebrows
slightly arch’ the corners of her eyes minutely
crinkled. God, she was beautiful He grinned.
“Anyone specific in mind, or will a girl do?”

Her eyes swiveled onto him like two guns in
a turret, her head followed.

“She’s ten years old. Her name is Amy Carol, she

has black hair and black eyes and a
smile that will break your heart.”

“And…”

“She has diabetes. She’s been in four
foster homes without a family of her own. She was
sexually abused in her first foster home, and the man
went to prison. She doesn’t like men. Jake’s
smile faded.

“Well.

“She needs us, Jake. Both of us. She needs
love and understanding and a place of her own and a man who
can be a loving father to her.”

Jake took a deep, deep breath, then
exhaled through his nose. Callie had mentioned
adoption casually in the months before the United
States sailed on this cruise, but it had been so
tentative with newspaper clippings left for him
to see, occasional dinner conversations, all of it
casual and distant, a social phenomenon worthy
a few minutes of notice. And she had been testing
the water! Jake sat now slightly baffled, trying
to recall just when and how he had lost sight of the
picture. The little girl at the next table caught
his eye. She had tomato sauce smeared all over
the lower half of her face and running down her fork,
which she held like a sword in her right fist.

“Amy Carol Grafton. When do we get
her?”

“Oh, Jake,” Callie exclaimed and dashed
around the table. She on his lap and enveloped him. People
at the neighboring tables applauded enthusiastically
as Callie gave him a long, passionate kiss.
After all, this was Italia.

Qazi leaned back against the sink.
Noora and Ali sat at the kitchen table with
Youssef and the senior helicopter pilot. “So
Sakol and Yasim are dead?”

“The police radio says they are.

“Sakol is no loss,” Ali sneered. “But
Yasim is. Who were these people?”

Ali asked the question of Qazi.

“I don’t know. I heard the silenced
automatic weapon in the courtyard. I heard them
speaking English. I looked. One of them a
woman, perhaps Judith Farrell. We had finished
listening to the tapes Yasim had flagged, and Sakol
had left.”

“Why did you let him leave?” Ali asked.
“He could betray us.

“My judgment. My decision. We shook hands and
he left. A few moments later we heard the
shots and I looked out the window. ran toward the
stairwell and started down. Then we heard someone
running up. So I went up onto the roof.
Yasim must ve decided to go back through the
corridor and take the elevator down to the lobby.
He probably figured it would be safe with all the
people there.”

“So they killed him in the lobby.”

“Apparently. He isn’t here and the police are
telling each other there are two bodies.”

“Yasim is a martyr,” Youssef said.
“He’s on his way to paradise.”

Youssef was a Palestinian, the senior man in
the PLO contingent that El Hakim had foisted on
Qazi. Political considerations. The PLO
needed a success just now, and El Hakim would need
the PLO if this operation was to pay the kind of
dividends the dictator hoped it would. So the
PLO should earn a share of El Hakim’s glory.
Not too much of it, of course, but an expedient little
bit of the shine. Too bad, Qazi thought bitterly,
that the Palestinians’ primary asset was
enthusiasm.

“What do the Americans know?” Ali asked.

“This afternoon Captain Grafton and his wife
discussed the fact Farrell is not a native
English-speaker. Apparently they were worried she
would entrap Lieutenant Tarkington, one of the
officers from the ship.

Grafton had the Americans searching for
Tarkington this afternoon, apparently without success. Then
the Graftons went out. Grafton is suspicious
and worried, but he really knows nothing.”

“Someone knows something,” Ali said. “If that
assassination team is waiting at the helicopters
or the Americans are warned or the Italians are
alerted, we won’t succeed.”

“At last,” Qazi said acidly, “you begin
to appreciate some of the basic facts.”

Ali said nothing.

“I’m worried about the weather,” the pilot said.
“The winds are going to get gusty, and we’ll have rain
showers under a low overcast. It may get very rough in
the air tonight.”

“Is it possible to fly?”

“Yes, it’s possible, if the forecast is
accurate. But if the weather is worse than
forecast, it will be dangerous. There will be no margin for
error.”

“And in Sicily?”

“The weather should be better there. That is the forecast,
anyway.

“So there are many factors we cannot control. We
knew that when we were planning.”

Youssef spoke. “The PLO does not want this
mission to fail. The chairman has given the
orders. My men and I are ready to proceed
regardless of the danger.”

Qazi ignored him.

“Could we wait a day?” Noora asked. “The
weather might improve.”

“They may dispose of the crate on the ship. The
carabinieri or the GRU or the CIA or the
Mossad or the Mafia may catch on.” Qazi
ticked them off on his fingers. “There is already at
least one assassination team out there on the hunt. And
Yasim or Sakol may still be alive, and the
police-radio conversations just a ruse. If either is
alive, he can be made to talk. The risk
increases every minute we wait. It’s now or never.
Do we go?”

Noora and Ali looked at each other, then
back at Qazi. They both nodded yes.

Qazi slapped his hands together. “Okay.
Youssef, load the vans.

Noora, getJarvis to supervise the loading of the
trigger. Then line the men up for inspection. Ali and
I will check every man. When that is done, we’ll
pull in the guards and be on our way.” He looked
at his watch. “We leave in twenty-seven
minutes. Go!”

QAZI AND ALI sat in the front seat of the
van and stared through binoculars at the gate in
the chain-link fence and the helicopter pad beyond. Nothing
moved under the lights on the corner of the hangars.

Qazi aimed his binoculars through his open window at
the guard shack. The old man was inside. He
stil] had a two-day growth of beard.

The colonel turned in his seat and examined the
tops of the warehouses across the street. No heads
or suspicious objects in evidence. He
scanned the windows.

“What do you think?” Ali asked.

Colonel Qazi laid the binoculars in his lap
and sat watching the scene.

“Go,” he said at last.

Ali stepped from the van and eased the door shut.
He walked past the edge of the nearest warehouse and
on across the street, where he was luminated by a
streetlight. Qazi could hear his foot. steps
fading. He raised his binoculars and scanned the
warehouses again, trying to detect movement. There was
none. He wung the glasses to the guard shack and
watched Ali walk up to the window.

The guard opened it. Ali reached through the winow.
Qazi knew he was cutting the telephone wire.
Then Ali walked on toward the hangar.