Reprisal (18 page)

“Do you think you could nudge someone into inviting Hasan to some kind of ceremony here in Aqaba or close by? Like throwing
stones at the Israeli border, for instance.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

She fixed them another two cognacs and once again touched glasses with him, this time in a silent toast with smiling eyes.

“Will you let me help?” she asked.

“I work alone,” Dartley said brusquely. Then he softened his tone. “It’s best I do it that way in case things go wrong. The
fewer involved, the more workable the operation. If I can do it solo, I will. If I can’t, I’ll call on you. Thanks for your
offer.”

“Let me know,” she said.

“I assume there’s going to be some kind of ceremony on land, either before he goes to the yacht or after he comes back. That’s
when I’ll take him. Not at the ceremony itself—that will be too well guarded. No, I’ll take him when he’s leaving his hotel
to go there. Although he’s not spending a night here in Aqaba, he’ll have a hotel suite in order to send and
receive messages from Cairo, a place for him to go to the John. He’s very vain. I’m sure he’ll change his uniform several
times during the day. Ill take him there. Find out which hotel hell be using.”

“You’ll need a rifle then,” she said.

“Two. One with a telescopic sight, one without, both automatic. And two semi-automatic pistols, .45 or 9 mm. Also some anti-tank
missiles and a launcher.”

“To assassinate someone outside a hotel?”

“Why not? I want to be sure not to miss him.”

She laughed. “I don’t think we’ll have any problem in getting you the weapons.”

’ “I’ll need two cars, one to use and one as a backup. Not stolen cars. Hire them legitimately under a false name and make
them regular cars, nothing unusual or eyecatching.”

’All right.”

“I’ll need a driver.”

She shook her head. “I can’t give you personnel. Practically anything else, but not personnel.”

“I’ll get my own,” Dartley said, not particularly upset.

“Who?” she asked with curiosity.

“I have these little elves and goblins who do things for me.”

“Elves? Goblins?” She said the words in her French accent, searching for their meaning in her memory. “Ah, yes, I understand.
Fairies, no?”

“I hope not,” Dartley said.

They talked and joked for a while. Once, when Michelle was getting something, she brushed Dartley with her right breast. As
she turned to face him, his eyes automatically looked at that part of her body.
She smiled at him for having drawn such an easy response from him, arid he smiled back at her, eager now for her body and
determined to enjoy it.

She picked up on his excitement and flirted with him, stirring the fires of lust in him. Her body undulated gracefully beneath
the silk peignoir, which parted occasionally to reveal a lace-trimmed, short nightgown underneath. Her long, suntanned thighs
were bared for a tantalizing instant to his view, then disappeared again beneath the slippery folds of silk.

Dartley took her in his arms, kissed her full on the lips, and pushed his tongue deep into her mouth while his hands ran over
the contours of her hips and squeezed the cheeks of her shapely ass. She responded willingly to his touches. He felt her large
breasts swell in his palms beneath the silky material of her peignoir.

Dartley peeled the garment off her and then stripped the nightgown from her inviting flesh. She sank naked and quivering to
the thick carpet on the floor. Dartley swiftly climbed out of his clothes and joined her on the soft, heavy carpet. His powerful
hands stroked her delicate body, and the smooth feel of her skin inflamed his senses.

He ran his lips and tongue over her whole body, driving her into a frenzy of desire, so that she twisted and turned in hot
lust beneath his masterful and tender caresses. At last she couldn’t take it anymore and yelled at him to penetrate her and
ease her desperate hunger. He slowly entered her and heard her moan with pleasure.

She was small and tight. As he rammed home his
member in her moist, welcoming sex, he felt the waves of sensation rippling through her flesh.

He drove up hard and fast and deep inside her, in swelling energy and surging excitement—and forgot completely for a time
why he was here in this chic Arab resort on the Red Sea.

Richard Dartley woke early in his room at the Aquamarina Hotel. He had a full day ahead of him in which he had nothing to
do. Ahmed Hasan would arrive in Amman this morning and spend the rest of the day and tonight there. After leaving Michelle
Perret the previous afternoon, he had contacted Aaron Gottlieb by phone and met him at the Tourist Information Center, housed
in what had once been a royal palace. The Israeli agreed to drive for him and they planned a timetable. Their meeting was
short, like any two tourists casually exchanging tips and information. Then Dartley hired a scuba diving outfit at the Aquamarina
Club and swam among the vividly hued corals and tropical fish of the almost freshwater-clear Red Sea. That night he ate the
Jordanian specialty called mensef—roast lamb stuffed with rice, highly spiced with cinnamon, sprinkled with pine nuts and
almonds, and served with makheedh, which was yogurt combined with mutton fat. Dartley was
beginning to feel like it might be a few years before he ordered lamb again after this mission. He discovered that in Cairo
he had been drinking Turkish coffee, which was thick and bitter. The true Arabic coffee was quite different in taste—thin
and heavily flavored with cardamom seed. He slept well and woke before the October sun had risen high enough to send the temperature
into the eighties.

He swam in the sea opposite the hotel, preferring the natural seawater to the chlorinated liquid in the hotel pool. During
breakfast at the hotel, he understood enough of the news on the radio to hear it confirmed that the president of Egypt was
expected in the capital today and in Aqaba tomorrow. Dartley would be here with a personal welcome for him. Meanwhile, he
intended to put Hasan to the back of his mind for today and enjoy himself.

Lawrence of Arabia was one of Dartley’s heroes—not the Peter O’Toole version of the movie, but the real man, who besides being
a great soldier was the author of
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Back in his one-room apartment over the barn at his uncle’s farm, Dartley had spent many hours reading the works of famed
military men. Some couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag and made themselves sound pompously foolish or else very ordinary.
Lawrence was a military genius and wrote like a genius. His descriptions of desert warfare during World War I could make a
reader feel that he was actually out on the sandy wastes, along with fierce nomadic tribesmen, riding to attack at dawn—on
camels, naturally.

Aqaba had been the scene of one of T. E. Lawrence’s
famous ventures. This region was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire in World War I. The British sent Lawrence, then a young
army officer, to stir the Arabs into revolt against the Turks, thus making it necessary for Turkey to send big numbers of
troops—who might otherwise be fighting the British—to quell the rebellion.

Although Aqaba was no longer an important port since the opening of the Suez Canal, the Turks realized its strategic importance
and stationed a strong garrison to guard the town. In July, 1917, Lawrence and Prince Feisal led a war party of desert tribesmen
through the desolate, moonscapelike area of Wadi Rum. The Turks had not believed that any living thing could come that way
and were wiped out in a surprise attack.

Aqaba became an important headquarters and supply base for the Arab forces in what came to be known as the Great Arab Revolt.
The Arab forces harassed the Turks as they retreated northward and drove them into a British force on the Mediterranean coast.
The Arabs and British cut the Turks into pieces and dealt a fatal blow to the Axis powers in the Middle East.

Aqaba had been a grimy little fishing village back then, and Dartley knew better than to expect to see what Lawrence saw in
what was now an Arabic version of Miami Beach. But the Wadi Rum was still there, unchanged. He hired a car under the name
of Fairbairn Draper and drove inland for an hour until he reached the fort of the Desert Camel Corps. This corps was the only
remnant still extant of the Arab Legion organized by Lawrence.

The Desert Patrol was posing for photos when he arrived. The soldiers stood patiently next to their squatting camels as the
tourists milled around. The soldiers wore full-length zabouns, crisscrossed by scarlet bandoliers and cartridge belts, into
which were stuck ornate daggers and pistols. These Bedouins wore tribal red-and-white-checked kaffiyehs with a black cord.
Their women wore long black dresses embroidered with bright designs. They all seemed to be enjoying the attention they were
getting. They also looked like the kind of people who could be unpleasant if they became annoyed. The tourists kept respectful.

Dartley hired a camel and a guide. They headed out across the mudflats, away from the fort, the Bedouin tents, and ruined
temple and the tourist buses and cars. Dartley was amused by his camel—it had the same bored indifference that he often saw
in riding horses for hire, setting off at its own easy pace, regardless of what its rider was trying to get it to do. This
one stayed at about four o’clock to the guide’s camel, so that the guide had to shout back his information to Dartley in his
extraordinarily rapid English and heavy local accent. Dartley would have understood him better if he had spoken Arabic slowly,
but he said nothing, not wishing to cause offense. He just let the unintelligible babble of words flow over him, relaxed his
body to the shifting motion of the camel’s gait and looked around him.

The jagged massif of Jebel Rum stuck five thousand feet into the air. Other enormous slabs of rock thrust upward out of the
desert floor. Sheer, towering cliffs of weathered sandstone rose out of the white
and pink sands. Here and there battered ruins lay half submerged in the shifting dust. They passed through a gap in the cliffs
and entered the vast, silent, seemingly endless interior of the Wadi Rum and other lesser wadis. This was the area known as
the Valley of the Moon. The wadis, or river beds, had been dry for a million years, and their stones and sands were bleached
by the sun nearly every day of every year for a countless span of time—certainly before mankind walked upon the earth.

Lawrence had not shied away from a place like this. He had persuaded the prince and his desert warriors to maneuver across
this hostile terrain, scale the mountains behind Aqaba, and descend upon the overconfident Turks.

Just when Dartley had begun to feel he’d make a damn good desert warrior himself, out in the wastelands beneath the blazing
sun, he noticed that the tip of his nose was bright red and starting to peel.

Dartley woke at first light the next morning. Michelle Perret had visited him in his hotel room late the previous night. After
she rubbed Noxema on his nose, forehead and cheeks, they made love. The car he needed was in the hotel parking lot, the weapons
in its trunk. A gray Peugeot. She gave him the keys. She told him the location of the backup car, a blue Honda. Its keys were
in the dashboard ashtray.

“Have you got someone to drive you?” she asked.

“I’m doing it alone,” he lied. “I don’t need anyone.”

She left alone, not wishing to be seen with him in case he was caught later.

“I came in the back way. No one saw me. I’ll go
back that way.” She kissed him hard on the mouth. “Be careful, please.”

Dartley slept lightly, as he always did the night before a major challenge. But although his sleep was interrupted by periods
of watchful consciousness, he felt rested and fresh early the next morning. No doubt making love to Michelle had helped drain
the tension from his body.

He slipped out of the hotel and found the gray Peugeot in the car park. He wanted to check the weapons, but could not do so
here unobserved.

He pulled on a pair of cotton gloves thin enough so he lost little sense of touch through them, and left another pair for
Gottlieb on the seat beside him. They might never associate this car with the assassination and dust it for prints. Then again,
they might. Dartley didn’t believe in throwing evidence about the place when he could help it. The car handled well along
the coast road, past the port and industrial area, and then out along the lonely stretches of beach toward the Saudi border.
The gas tank was full. Things were beginning to check out. He felt a surge of excitement and his mind raced over all the details
of what he expected to happen today. This was the feeling he most enjoyed about his line of work—not the killing itself, but
the preparations, weighing the risks, the anticipation, the uncertainty, watching for the unexpected…

He pulled the car over at a deserted beach and hid it from the road behind a small dune. He switched the engine off, got out,
and opened the trunk.

The weapons were inside. Two Colt M1911A1 pistols, two Galil rifles—one with a scope, three
missiles stretching diagonally from corner to corner, and a cardboard container of ammo. The missiles were a big surprise.
When Dartley asked Michelle for anti-tank missiles, all he expected to get were rockets. A rocket, launched from a container
on the shoulder and propelled by the jet stream from a motor or from the combustion of an explosive, rarely had a flight time
of more than a few seconds and therefore a limited range. In addition, once a rocket was fired, its trajectory was set—it
could not, be steered or maneuvered. Rockets were lighter and cheaper than missiles; he was amazed that the French had sprung
for three guided missiles. But it certainly showed that Michelle had not bought his story about taking out Ahmed Hasan on
the steps of his hotel.

He loaded the magazines and spares for the two pistols, then test-fired a few rounds from each. If they used these pistols,
it would be for self-defense at close quarters—so he cared little for these guns’ accuracy. So long as their mechanisms were
cared for and smoothly operating, he was happy with them. The Colt M1911A1 was the old reliable .45 automatic that the U.S.
Armed Forces had been depending on since the year in its model number—1911. The basic design of the gun had remained unchanged,
and there were few complaints about it through two world wars, Korea, Vietnam and beyond. Protests began to be heard, however,
when the Pentagon announced it was going to dump the .45 in favor of a 9 mm pistol, probably a Beretta, so that American forces
would use the same ammo as the NATO allies.