Retribution (17 page)

Following him through the narrow streets of the old city, Dartley realized the man was doubling back toward the harbor and
the car. He heard another five rockets as he followed him and caught a sideview of the youth’s smiling face. The bastard was
having a big day. There were lots of others hurrying through the narrow streets to get away from the disasters, so following
the youth was not a problem.

He seemed to be too young to Dartley to be either of the men who had escaped him at the training stables in Ireland. From
this he had to assume there were no longer only two of them. When a man hunts alone, the way Dartley liked to do, he has to
keep careful tabs on numbers since they have a lot to do with the odds against his success. At the rate these fuckers were
throwing rockets around this afternoon, they badly needed to be thinned out.

On a dingy street near the harbor Dartley realized he had made a mistake. The terrorist he was following had passed another
young man with no sign of recognition, Dartley thought this might be another Arab and possible confederate, so he quickened
his pace. The second one spotted Dartley as a tail and was moving up to warn the first, trying to do so without letting Dartley
see what he was doing.

But the one Dartley had originally been following paid no heed. Dartley guessed he had been trained in desert camps to crawl
under barbed wire and scale walls, but not how to detect someone following behind in a peacetime city. Tails are rare in a
combat zone. Finally Dartley’s shadow crossed the street so that he was between him and the driver of the Ford. Then he stepped
into à doorway and disappeared from view.

Dartley almost laughed out loud. He had no weapons, so he flexed and unflexed his hands in anticipation. This was almost good
clean fun.

He listened to the leather soles of his shoes ring out on the flagstones of the narrow sidewalk, knowing that his hidden assailant
would be timing his attack by them. His steps never faltered as he neared the doorway. Just before it he marked time, standing
in place with three perfectly regular-sounding steps. The Arab sprang out into empty air and received a violent flying kick
on his left temple.

Dartley regained his balance and with his right toe shattered the youth’s spine. Satisfied that if his attacker survived the
kick to his temple he would never think
straight again, and that if he survived the damage to his spinal column he would never walk straight again, Dartley picked
up the hunting knife his opponent had dropped.

He showed the knife to some onlookers who had stopped. “He tried to rob me,” Dartley explained.

A man with a large mustache removed a yellow-papered cigarette from his mouth and spat carefully into the downed youth’s face.
The others nodded in approval.

Dartley slipped the knife inside the top of his pants and hurried after the driver of the Ford. He had no way of knowing if
this man had looked back and seen anything. He had gained quite a bit of distance on Dartley but he didn’t seem to be moving
any faster than before. He stopped outside a hotel, turned around and looked back. Dartley was more than a hundred yards behind
him, yet he didn’t seem to notice him. He might have been puzzled where his comrade had gotten to. Then he went into the hotel,
not the main way, but by a side entrance on this street.

The American broke into a run. He pulled the knife as he ran through the door. A long corridor on the ground floor was empty.
He ran up a flight of stairs and saw his prey walking halfway down a similar corridor on the second floor. Dartley took off
after him.

The terrorist turned when he heard him. Dartley had his right hand holding the knife behind his back, and he held his left
index finger to his smiling lips in a plea for silence.

The Arab was puzzled by this foreigner in this
foreign place, not sure whether to be amused or alarmed. He did not want to give away the presence of their meeting place
in this hotel by scuffling with a foolish stranger in the corridor. All the same, his hand drifted toward his gun pocket.

The stranger surprised him with the speed in which he covered the space between them. He was caught by the lapels and a long-bladed
knife seemed to come from nowhere. Its tip beneath his chin forced his face upward. He felt the stranger take his gun from
his pocket. The pressure on the knife point was getting harder and harder.

“Feen?”
the stranger said to him in Arabic, further confusing him.

He pointed to the second door down.

Dartley pushed the terrorist’s pistol into his pants top and forced him along at knife pint. Any trouble, he intended to dispose
of him without a warning gunshot. Dartley had a kind of talent for nonverbal communication, as evidenced by the fact that
the Arab trotted along meekly as a lamb and knocked at the door.

They heard a grunt from inside the room.

Dartley lay the honed edge of the blade across the terrorist’s windpipe so he could really feel it while he talked. He said
something in Arabic, too fast and too difficult for Dartley to understand. The American heard first one lock turn, then a
second, and the door began to slowly open inward.

With his left hand Dartley seized the terrorist by the hair, yanking his head back, drew the blade across
his throat and booted him in the small of the back belly-first against the opening door.

Blood spraying from his severed arteries and veins, he fell on his comrade opening the door. This youth screamed in horror,
splashed with his friend’s blood. He backed into the room while Dartley checked that the Colt Commander .45 automatic he had
taken was ready to fire.

Another youth appeared. He held a grenade and was pulling the pin. Dartley fired and hit him in the gut, maybe too late to
stop him from throwing that grenade through the door. He twisted into the corridor clear of the doorway, expecting any moment
to hear the grenade rattle along the floor after him.

Instead the wall quaked and buckled, plaster fell on his head, as the grenade blew in the room. He could hardly see in through
the dust and smoke. The windows were gone, the ceiling was bared to the wooden lathes.

In one corner he saw an entire jeans leg, sock, and running shoe. It took a moment to sink in that the limb was still in them.

Colonel Yitzhak Bikel, General Gerrit van Gilder, and Group-Captain Godfrey Bradshaw were playing penny poker with Israeli
shekels in a safe house outside Tel Aviv.

Bikel was in a jovial mood. “I don’t believe the Dutch would have jeopardized relations with Spain by doing it. The French
would have botched up the job. I believe the Spanish when they say they didn’t do it. The Americans would have tried to involve
us in it. And I know
we
didn’t do it. What do you say, Bradshaw? Why don’t you come clean about it?”

“You can’t be saying, sir, that you believe Her Majesty’s government is responsible for the deaths of those four terrorists
in Barcelona,” Bradshaw said with seemingly genuine indignation in his voice.

“You have the capability in place there and you have every reason to strike back at them,” Bikel persisted.

“Dammit, man, I’m not saying that we wouldn’t,” Bradshaw said. “I’m saying that we didn’t.”

“To your knowledge,” van Gilder put in.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“They might not have told you,” van Gilder explained ponderously.

Bradshaw’s face became brick red and he threw down his cards.

To change the subject Bikel said, “They were fortunate to have had no other fatalities with twenty rockets fired.”

“Some of the very badly injured might perhaps have been better off dead,” van Gilder said.

“Perhaps,” Bikel said. “I’ve seen many cases of that. But at least it reverses the score on these Palestinians. We believe
the ones killed were fresh from the training camp we hit, sent to Europe without adequate preparation to seek revenge for
our raid. Our enemies are highly predictable.”

Bradshaw squinted carefully at Bikel. “Who besides you believes Britain was responsibile?”

“Everyone in the know,” Bikel answered casually.

“I can truthfully assure you that I have not been informed,” Bradshaw said.

“Then I hope for your sake, Bradshaw, it turns out not to be true,” Bikel said kindly, having pulled on the barb firmly enough
now to expect an answer. If he knew Bradshaw, a message would be radioed tonight to Whitehall, demanding an answer by tomorrow.

“You believe what the Germans say?” Bradshaw asked, changing the subject in turn.

“They’re telling the truth,” van Gilder answered instead of Bikel. “Because of the refugee problem in West Berlin, the West
Germans have set up an efficient monitoring system at Schonefeld Airport in East Berlin. Two Arab males in their twenties,
answering the descriptions we circulated, arrived on an Interflug flight from Vienna. An Arab boy and girl in their late teens
were also on the flight.”

Bikel nodded. “That would fit in with our information on the Damascus–Rabat flight, which was five males and one female. Take
out four at Barcelona, and these two are left. How did they get from Barcelona to Vienna?”

“The West Germans don’t know,” van Gilder answered. “They think they might have flown to Paris and changed planes there for
Vienna without trying to enter French territory.”

“That was risky,” Bradshaw said, picking up his cards again and looking at his hand.

“They had good enough reason to be in a hurry to leave Spain,” Bikel said. “They must have believed their cover had been penetrated.
I suppose the West Germans are right to believe they’re probably already in Berlin by now. Bradshaw, don’t you think your
people should do something about the Berlin situation?”

Bradshaw’s eyes popped and he began to look apoplectic again. “Good God, certainly not, sir. As long as West Berlin remains
technically divided into
British, American, and French sectors, we are committed to maintaining it as an open city. I know Aeroflot and Interflug raise
hard foreign currency by selling tickets in Third World countries and permit them to land without visas in Schonefeld. The
East Berlin police even put them on the subway to West Berlin at Friedrichstrasse. The communists want us to react by sealing
our side of the border as they have done theirs. That’s what their real strategy is.”

“I agree,” van Gilder said. “I think the West Germans have to negotiate with the East Germans over this. And I believe they
were right to announce publicly that the East Germans allowed these four Arab terrorists to cross into West Berlin. It traps
all of them there, without their being able to move into West Germany proper.”

“What did you say that damn code word was, Bikel?” Bradshaw asked. “I keep forgetting the bloody thing.”

“Har HaTzofim.
It’s Hebrew for Mount Scopus.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” the group-captain said. “How could I have forgotten? Though maybe next time you’ll pick something snappier,
what?”

An ambulance marked both with a red cross and a green star and crescent bumped over the stony ground until it came to a halt
in front of the wooden gates of the walled compound. The driver and his assistant climbed out and hailed the two guards at
the gate covering them with Kalashnikovs. They waved up to
the man on the roof, squinting at them down the barrel of his .50-caliber machine gun.

“Why have you come here?” one guard asked.

The driver callously jerked his thumb toward the inside of the ambulance. “He’s one of yours.”

“Who?”

“I didn’t catch his name,” the driver said, opening the rear doors.

He and his assistant slid out a canvas stretcher on which lay a body wrapped in a sheet.

The driver grimaced. “He stinks, this one does.”

The two guards backed off as the ambulance men set the stretcher on the ground. They stared down at the shape bound within
the sheet.

“Who is he?”

“A friend of your boss. I told you, I don’t remember his name. You can keep the stretcher, but I wouldn’t leave him lying
around very long if I was you.” He got back in the ambulance with his assistant and pulled away across the stony ground back
toward the paved road.

All three guards had close family members who were members of various militias. Each stood around waiting for the others to
look first.

The youngest moved forward. “He doesn’t smell so bad,” he said. He tried to loosen the sheet, but finally had to slash it
open with his bayonet so he could see the dead man’s face.

He had an instant of surprise as he saw, not a ghastly death’s-head but a life-size human form sculptured
from putty. This massive charge of plastic explosives was detonated by the trip-wires in the sheet. The blast atomized the
three guards, tore the gates off their hinges, and crumpled the entire wall on that side of the compound.

The ambulance was charging back and came to a halt. This time the rear doors were kicked open from the inside and militia
men wearing camouflage fatigues came pouring out. Three used their automatic rifles to fire grenades over the remains of the
wall into the windows of the house. Fire bloomed in the house’s interior, and long flames came licking out the windows.