Ultimatum (23 page)

Ascher had heard Hanna Nasour complaining about the impossibility of resting, let alone sleeping, while the noise in the street persisted. ‘I haven’t slept for twenty-four hours,’ she said, adding with a touch of hysteria, ‘This noise is driving me round the bend.’

Souref had backed her up, suggested that those off watch should rest in the cloakroom in the back-yard. They could take rugs and make themselves reasonably comfortable. At least there would be freedom from the worst of the noise.

After some discussion Hamadeh and Daab had agreed, undertaking to call them at five o’clock when they were due to come on watch. It was when Daab said, ‘That’s right, Hanna. Take those Kashan rugs, they’re soft,’ that Ascher had hissed his warning and held up his hand. When he was satisfied that the off-watch Palestinians had left the front office, he gave Levi the task of listening to the Mocal bugs. To McFagan he said, ‘There’s a complication. I must get on to the command vehicle at once.’ He picked up the mike, gave the call sign, got an answering, ‘Go ahead Bravo Whisky Three,’ and asked for Barlov. Moments later he heard the Colonel’s voice.

Ascher said, ‘We have a complication here. Have stopped work temporarily. I’ll report again shortly. Over.’

Barlov replied, ‘Roger, Bravo Whisky Three.’

The members of the Ground Force removed their
respirators
and Ascher outlined the problem. ‘This is serious,’ he said. ‘We have an entirely new situation. Hanna and Souref have gone to rest in the cloakroom at the back of the yard. They get there through a passageway open to the sky. It’s about twenty-five feet long. Bounded on one side by the
walls of the stockroom and cloakroom. On the other by an eight-foot brick wall.’

‘What’s on the other side of that?’ asked McFagan.

‘A more or less identical passageway. It belongs to number Forty-One. Occupied by a firm of coffee brokers.’ Ascher fidgeted with his beard. ‘A little more than halfway down the Mocal passageway there’s an open yard, about fifteen by ten feet, off to the right. The cloakroom door opens on to its south side. The cloakroom is about ten by six. A WG at the far end occupies roughly one-third of that area. The remaining two-thirds has the hand basin, wash-up sink, roller towel, etcetera. Adjoining the WC there’s an old coal shed. No longer used. Now a junk store.’

‘Interesting,’ said Joliffe, ‘but disastrous. HXC324 is a splendid toxic agent, odourless, colourless, lethal, but like most gases it won’t run down open passageways.’ There was a tense discussion then on the possibility of introducing gas into the cloakroom, but it was soon dismissed. The Palestinians on watch would be relieved in about an hour. There was no safe place from which to drill into the
cloak-room
. Street noises made by the trench diggers would not reach so far back with the intensity needed and, finally, Joliffe was doubtful if his two cylinders could produce enough gas for a second operation.

At this stage the Special Branch man operating the R/T was heard to say, ‘Go ahead, Whisky Bravo One. Over.’

The others watched him closely, heard his ‘Roger, Whisky Bravo One. Will do.’ He spoke to McFagan. ‘Message from the command vehicle, sir. Two men are on their way over. They’ll be here in a few minutes.’

The ‘two men’ who arrived soon afterwards, turned out to be the General and Colonel Barlov. Ruth Meyer, listening in Number 56 to the Mocal bugs, had heard the decision that those off watch should rest in the cloakroom and reported immediately to the Command vehicle. As it was not practical to discuss this with Ascher over the air the General and Barlov had come to 37.

‘Well.’ The General rubbed his hands with the air of a
man about to do business. ‘Let’s have your appreciation of the situation, Ascher. You know the lie of the land next door, you know die Palestinians and their habits, and you’ve heard all they’ve said.’

Ascher described the lay-out of 39 and dwelt on the limitations imposed by the new situation – two Palestinians with the warhead in the front office, two resting outside – and no possibility of getting at the latter with Joliffe’s HXC324.

‘What are the possible courses of action?’ Instinctively the General addressed his question to Ascher who appeared to have assumed command.

‘Only one worth considering. The watches change at five. That’s in about forty-five minutes. If we introduce gas into the front office now, the Palestinians outside may come back at any moment and find Daab and Hamadeh
unconscious.
Joliffe says his gas requires from three to five minutes to induce unconsciousness, ten to fifteen to kill. Taking the first factor, there’d be time for Hanna and Souref to detonate the warhead before they lost consciousness.’

‘What is your proposal?’

‘We delay the introduction of gas. I know the lay-out at the back. I’ve been over it before. We use one of the Water Authority vans. Get into it and ask the driver to back down Spender Street past 39 and park outside 41. We force the door of 41, go in through the premises to the passageway at the back. It runs parallel to 39’s and shares an eight-foot wall with it. When we’re in position at the far end we give the go-ahead by R/T and Joliffe opens the gas valves. Five minutes later we go over the wall and drop down outside the cloakroom.’

The General said, ‘And then?’

‘We knock on the door. They’ll think they’re being called to go on watch. They’ll come out.’

‘And when they do?’

‘We kill them.’

The General frowned in parade-ground fashion. ‘Sounds rather drastic. Is that really necessary?’

‘How else can we make sure they won’t warn those inside?’

‘Killing can be a rowdy business, Ascher.’

‘Not the way we do it. And not with those noises in the street.’

‘I don’t much like the idea.’

‘Do you like the idea of hundreds of thousands of Londoners being killed and maimed?’

The General looked into the intense eyes set deep in the bearded face, bathed in the red light of the camping torch. In that moment he was glad he wasn’t resting in 39’s cloakroom. ‘You’re satisfied you can deal with the two
outside
without disturbing those inside?’

‘As satisfied as we can be. There are no certainties in this situation. And there are no alternatives.’

‘Other than to give in, Ascher. The politicians like the idea.’

‘Of course they do. And we know why. But, if they did, what guarantee would they have that other, probably more extravagant, demands would not follow? Blackmailers aren’t interested in the one-off business.’

Ascher was preaching to the converted. This was a point the General had hammered home at meetings of the ad hoc Committee.

‘That, Ascher, is a very good question. One to which I believe there is no satisfactory answer. Now tell me. Who will go over the wall?’

‘Zol Levi and myself.’

The general sat chin in hand, deep in thought, before he turned to Barlov. ‘What do you think of this, Barlov?’

‘I agree with Ascher’s view.’

‘I thought you might. Yours, McFagan?’

The Chief Superintendent didn’t answer immediately. By instinct and training he preferred to think things over before expressing a view. ‘I agree.’ He said it cautiously. ‘Subject to Moynihan and Barrett acting in close support. Things can go wrong. We have an overriding responsibility. With my men there, the chances of failure are reduced.’

The General nodded. ‘I support that.’

Ascher frowned. I’m not too happy about that. In my experience the smaller the number engaged in cloak-
and-dagger
stuff the better.’

There was some discussion then, but McFagan was insistent and in the end Ascher gave way on condition the Special Branch men kept well behind and only interfered if such action became absolutely essential.

‘Respirators?’ enquired the General.

‘They cramp a man’s style,’ said Ascher. ‘We shouldn’t need them. Moynihan can keep some on his side of the wall. We’ll shout if we want them and he can throw them over.’

The General asked his final question. ‘Weapons?’

‘Coshes, combat knives, automatics.’

‘Handguns are noisy.’

Ascher smiled. ‘Not ours.’

The wind from the south-west had freshened, bringing more rain, heightening the darkness so that the men standing inside the doorway at the back of Number 41 could see nothing.

Ascher said, ‘Give the CV the go-ahead.’

Barrett, the Special Branch man, pressed the
speak-button
. ‘Whisky Bravo Five calling Whisky Bravo One.’

There was an answering, ‘Go ahead, Whisky Bravo Five.’

‘Water main requires new valves,’ said Barrett.

From the command vehicle came, ‘Roger, Whisky Bravo Five. Will do.’

Ascher looked at the illuminated dial of his watch: 4.25 am. The gas would be going in within seconds. By four-thirty they should be able to go over the wall. In the darkness he touched Moynihan’s arm. ‘Fine. We’ll get into position. As soon as Barrett receives the okay, come down and join us. Okay?’

The Special Branch Inspector said, ‘Will do.’

Ascher said, ‘Come on, Zol.’

He and Levi disappeared into the darkness, moving silently in stockinged feet, hugging the wall to their right, feeling their way along it as they went. Ascher had done a reconnaissance five minutes earlier. Now he was counting his strides. Seven covered the length of the passageway. He stopped at five, crouching against the wall, so tense that the steadily-falling rain and his wet stockinged feet went unnoticed. He looked at the watch again: 4.26 am. Four minutes to go. From long experience he knew the time would pass slowly now, the minutes dragging. He concentrated his mind on the lay-out of the premises on the far side of the wall, on what had to be done once over it, thinking in terms
of time and distance. While his mind was busy with this check list, he took the Maxim silencer from a pocket of his denim jeans and with a quick twist of the interrupted thread locked it on to the Mauser automatic. His fingers touched the handle of the sheath-knife on his belt, eased the
cosh-thong
round his wrist, patted the torch in his hip-pocket. He wouldn’t be able to use that until they’d dealt with the two Palestinians in the cloakroom. He had a mental picture of them. They were people he felt he knew quite well. He’d often seen them in the last few weeks, more often heard their voices. He harboured no feelings of animosity, no emotions of hate or anger. This was war. They represented forces bent upon dismembering Israel. They had to be eliminated. Hanna was very much a woman. Attractive, a pleasant voice, amusing at times, irritating at others. The sort of girl he could have gone for in other circumstances. Ibrahim Souref was a decent enough young man,
conscientious
– worried always about the girl – too adolescent
perhaps
, probably not hard enough, for the role in which he’d been cast. Daab and Hamadeh were the tough guys, Zeid Barakat the brainy one. Ascher looked at his watch: 4.28 am – hopefully only two minutes to go.

In some respects the pictures in Levi’s mind resembled those in Ascher’s. For him, however, a persistent one was the big bale of carpets. He saw again the Palestinians struggling to get it through the double-doors that afternoon, lifting one side to reduce its width. Thanks to the Mocal bugs the Israelis knew where the bale had ended up. In the outer office, against the shelving on the right-hand wall, closer to the stock-room than the street. In Zol Levi’s mind there was a well-defined picture of the warhead lying inside the bale, Daab sitting at the desk near it with the firing-switch, the electric timing device clicking away the hours and minutes to noon. Crouched against the wall in pouring rain, Levi knew that he was now within thirty to forty feet of the warhead. There was one certainty. If it went off he’d know nothing about it.

In the midst of his fear, he grinned. He would be at the
centre of the ‘hot-spot’. What would his mother say to that? She was always complaining that he didn’t look after
himself
properly. ‘Why Zol? It is absurd not to take an undervest when you are going to that awful European climate.’ His thoughts switched to the Palestinians in the cloakroom. Though separated from him by two brick walls they were, he knew, no more than ten feet away. He wondered what they were doing. Sleeping? Making love?

As he fitted the silencer to his Mauser he was thinking it would be better if things worked out so that he killed Souref, and Ascher killed the girl. He looked at his watch. The minute hand was almost on the thirty mark. He stiffened, tightened his grip on the automatic and with his free hand checked the knife and cosh. It would be any second now.

‘Whisky Bravo One calling Whisky Bravo Five.’

‘Go ahead, Whisky Bravo One.’

‘New valves for water-main now on their way.’

‘Roger, Whisky Bravo One.’ Barrett clipped the mike back into an inside pocket. ‘That’s the okay, Inspector.’

Moynihan said, ‘Right. You stay here. Keep your eyes and ears open. I’ll join them.’

He stepped outside, feeling his way along the left-hand wall, counting the paces. The Israelis were quite close, only fifteen feet down the passageway. Ascher had said, ‘It’s twenty-five feet long. The garbage bins are at the end. Keep clear of them. We can’t risk noise.’

Moynihan had gone only a few paces when his left knee hit something. There was an appalling crash of empty tins falling on to the concrete surface of the passageway. Horrified, he stopped. He remembered the rows of 20 lb coffee tins on the shelves in the outer office of Number 41. He must have bumped into a stack of empties. But how was it the Israelis had avoided them?

Ascher had said hug the right-hand wall. He’d done that – or had he? Oh Christ! What had Ascher meant by ‘
right-hand
’ wall. Moynihan had taken it to be the wall on the
right looking towards Spender Street. Not the wall on the right as you went down the passageway.

Ascher heard the loud clatter and froze against the wall. The next moment Moynihan reached him. His hand touched the Israeli’s shoulder. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ He was hoarse with repentance. ‘Barrett’s received the okay.’

There was no time for recrimination. Only one thing counted now and that was speed. In spite of the noise made by the trench diggers, muted though it was by distance and the intervening walls, the Palestinians in the cloakroom could have been disturbed. If they had been they would investigate. The Israelis had to get over the wall before that happened.

Ascher said, ‘Now! Quick!’ and Levi leant against the wall. Ascher stood on his back, reached up, grasped the top of the wall and drew himself on to it. He sat there for a moment looking down into the rain-drenched darkness, shifting the automatic to his right hand, then lowering himself from the wall with his left.

Levi, using Moynihan’s back, went up on to the wall seconds afterwards.

She knew from his heavy breathing that Ibrahim, lying beside her on the Kashan rugs, had fallen asleep. How could he sleep under such circumstances, she asked herself in a burst of resentment. The place smelt lavatorial, and though the rugs kept out the cold they did little to soften the hard floor. And that was not all. Noon was less than eight hours away – eight decisive hours. The Prime Minister’s broadcast at ten o’clock should resolve the dreadful uncertainty, but in the meantime tension was building up to levels she found intolerable. Far more so than in any other operation on which she’d been engaged.

This was the great gamble. Ka’ed’s Final Solution. For them it was win or lose it all. If it came off they would have
achieved at a stroke the seemingly impossible … the return of the lost lands … a sovereign independent Palestine … a new life and hope for three million people. If it failed? Her mind turned away from the prospect.

Yet, with all that at stake, Ibrahim could lie there fast asleep, even snoring. She looked at the illuminated dial of her watch and saw it was four-thirty. They would be called in half an hour. It was awful of him. She so badly needed his companionship, his assurances. After all they were in love … Why did he?

She was startled by a sudden noise. A metallic clatter close by which sounded above the distant hammering in the street. Maybe it was Hamadeh or Daab coming to the cloakroom and dropping something, a kettle perhaps? Or a cat dislodging the lid of a garbage tin? She sat up, listening intently, her hand on the butt of her revolver. She was very conscious at that moment that the cloakroom had a lock but no key.

‘Ibrahim, Ibrahim.’ She whispered into his ear as she shook him.

Souref grunted, turned towards her in the darkness. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘There’s a noise outside. Quite close. I think someone’s there.’

That brought him to his feet, awake and alert. ‘I’ll check. You cover me.’

She heard the complaining squeak of rusty hinges and cold wet air blew in her face as he went out. She stood for a moment in the doorway before stepping into the yard, gun in one hand, torch in the other. Once there she remained quite still, waiting.

After he’d dropped down into the passageway of Number 39, Ascher stood in the dark with his back pressed to the wall, his faculties concentrated on the cloakroom door less than ten feet from him. He was about to move towards it when he heard, above the blanketing sound of the jack-hammers in
the street, the slow squeak of door hinges. The noise came from ahead and to his left, and was followed by the faint scrape of shoes on concrete. Someone was moving from the cloakroom into the passageway. He edged forward, one silent step after the other. There was a dull thud behind him and he realized that Zol Levi must have slipped on landing.

A torch flashed from the darkness to Ascher’s left, followed by the mildly explosive
phut-phut
of Levi’s silencer. Spurts of flame leapt in answer from the passageway ahead as Ascher knelt and fired. There was the high whine of bullets passing close by, the thud of their impact on brick walls. There was no time for stalking now, it was a matter of seconds. Snatching the torch from a pocket, he flashed it ahead. The beam settled on a man crawling towards the back door of 39. He turned his head and Ascher saw that it was Souref. The Palestinian rolled suddenly to one side and Ascher saw his gun hand coming up. They fired simultaneously. The Israeli felt a blow in his stomach as solid as a kick. He stumbled forward and Souref fired again. The impact of the second bullet knocked the gun from Ascher’s right hand and drained all feeling from the fingers. He dropped the torch, drew his combat knife with his left and threw himself at the Palestinian. He felt the man’s hot breath and stabbed blindly at his face. There was sudden searing pain beneath his left ear and warm blood flushed down his neck. He let go involuntarily and Souref resumed his crawl. The Israeli tried to stand up but couldn’t, so he followed on all fours, pursuing the noisy rattle of the Palestinian’s breath. Souref must have
somehow
opened the door, for Ascher could see him now silhouetted against dim red light.

The Israeli’s mouth and throat were choking with blood. He spat it away, gasping for breath, knowing with awful certainty that he was dying, that Souref was not far from the firing switch.

With a supreme effort he rose to his feet, staggered a few paces and lurched on to the Palestinian, grasping him in a bear-like hug.