Authors: The Sands of Sakkara (html)
Deacon felt the touch on his arm,
suddenly aware of an intense, pleasant sensation in his groin, and wished the
hell they hadn't been related. He laughed back. 'So that's it?
me as a bloody spy. And who better to do it than someone I know. But why me,
for God's sake? What could I do?'
'You fit the bill perfectly. A
British citizen, with no apparent connections to the Fatherland, your past
hidden behind the veil of adoption. An outwardly loyal citizen of the Crown.
You're an ideal candidate. And I have a distinct feeling you could be very
useful. Well, what do you say?'
Deacon looked back at Christina Eckart's
face, drank in her womanly, handsome figure, knowing he would have done
anything for her, then he shivered, remembering his father's last days alive in
the camp, fevered and coughing up blood.
'What would you have me do?'
There was mischief in her eyes.
'First, I want you to fuck me.
Then I want you to come to
Three months later, Deacon
arranged a ten-week touring holiday in
He was met off the train at
given a false passport, driven across the border into
At SD Ausland headquarters, the SS
intelligence arm to which Christina belonged, he was subjected to a series of
rigorous interviews over three days. He was recruited as an agent and
immediately began an intensive training course that lasted two solid months. He
learned how to. operate a radio and communicate in code, how to read maps,
avoid surveillance, and gather intelligence. Above all, he was trained to
observe. Where were the enemy arsenals, tank and airfield facilities? Where
were troops deployed? Artillery? What size, how much, where was it positioned?
Railways? What lines were active, what was in the yards and sidings? It was
hard work, but it proved an exhilarating experience, and back among his
father's people Harvey Deacon felt for the first time in his life that he truly
belonged.
He also spent the weekends
sleeping with Christina, indulging in a frenzied sexual ecstasy even more
pleasurable than that he'd enjoyed in
It was the first and only time Harvey Deacon had ever felt what passed for
passionate love in his life.
On their last weekend, as he made
love to her, she whispered softly in the darkness, 'Do wonderful things for the
Fiihrer in
some day we can be together?' Deacon went back to
On SD instructions, and with a
draft sent through a Swiss bank, he purchased the Sultan Club outright, expanding
the enterprise with a gaming licence. When the war finally came, his venture
proved to be a hotbed of gossip and information, just as his masters predicted.
Once British troops started to arrive in their thousands to fight Rommel, the
bars, nightclubs and red-light districts were the places to which they headed
for recreation. There was nothing like drink and women to impress a man into
talking, and Deacon kept his ears and eyes open. Soon he had more intelligence
material than he could handle, with contacts and unwitting informers in every
stratum of society, from lowly army subalterns up to the royal palace itself.
What he didn't transmit by radio, he passed on to a clerk at the Spanish
embassy, who used the diplomatic bag to send it via
It was after eleven that evening
¦when Deacon drove his black Packard towards
but instead of taking the road west out to the pyramids, he turned south, out
along the banks of the
later he reached the villa.
Maison Fleuve was large and
whitewashed, with shuttered windows, two floors with four bedrooms and a small,
overgrown garden surrounded by creeper-clad walls. It stood alone, had its own
private river mooring, and was originally built by one of Napoleon's campaign
generals to entertain his mistresses.
It had been Rebuilt several times
before it had belonged to Deacon's adoptive parents. He hardly ever used it
now, preferring his quarters on the houseboat. Besides, most of the villas in
the area were the secluded weekend retreats of the city's wealthy, vacant
during the week, and the property hadn't even got a telephone.
He pulled in under the shadows of
a cluster of banyan trees in the front garden and stepped out of the car. There
was a full moon and he could just make out the dark outline of the great
pyramid at Cheops ten miles away, flat fields of sugar cane in between,
stretching towards the desert.
He unlocked the door and stepped
into the darkened hallway.
The villa had no electricity, but
a couple of palm-oil lamps stood on the hall table, and he fumbled to light one
with a match. He locked the front door behind him, and fitted a solid, heavy
metal bar into a couple of slots either side, a precaution he'd installed for
added security. No one was going to come through the front entrance easily.
He turned towards another door
leading off from the hallway and unlocked it. A flight of stairs led down into
darkness. At the bottom of the steps was what had originally been a wine
cellar, the ancient racks covered in dust and cobwebs, dozens of wine bottles
stored there. But the general had found another use for the cave: as a secret
escape route. At the end of the cellar was a short tunnel, leading to a metal
door, rusting on its hinges.
Deacon unbolted the door, opened
it, and a breath of fresh air wafted in. Tall reeds lay beyond, a tiny stone
jetty hidden among them, leading out to the river, where there was a small
wooden rowing boat complete with an engine, covered with tarpaulin. He stepped
back to the bottom of the stairs. There was a single chair and a cupboard. He
unlocked the cupboard door and removed the radio transmitter hidden inside,
ignoring the loaded Luger nine-millimeter pistol beside it, then ran out the
wire to the aerial mounted on the tunnel's exterior wall, connected the
battery, switched on, and sat in the chair. The small green light glowed on the
console, but he still had another ten minutes to wait before the transmission
began.
What had happened at Hassan's flat
nagged at his mind.
Killing Evir, the burglar, had
been a messy business, but the man might have talked and that would have jeopardized
everything.
Even though he'd managed to
survive four years of war without detection, Deacon knew the Allies were not
fools. From this point on they'd be looking, and looking hard, reason enough
for him to be extra careful.
Especially now that
be visiting
With the war going badly for
he had a feeling the information would almost certainly elicit some sort of
response - why else would
about it?
But from his report last night
the problem of the safe house being discovered, and he awaited their reply.
When the radio had warmed up, he tuned in. A relay station in
headquarters, and once he heard the call sign he readied his notepad.
The signal was longer than usual
this time, and it was over twenty minutes later when he heard the letters AR,
meaning the message had finished, then came 'Good luck' and 'Please
acknowledge, and lastly K for over. He replied with a series of Rs, to indicate
he had received the transmission, and then he decoded.
When he was done, he stared at the
message. The enormity of it all was almost too much for him to take in. His
mouth went dry. He felt his bowels turn to water and a cold sweat broke out on
the back of his neck. He could hardly believe what he was reading, and he
whistled aloud.
'Well, blow me,' Deacon said,
smiling excitedly to himself, 'it looks like we're really in business.'
At that same moment, Hassan was in
the crowded back streets of Ezbekiya, a chaotic district full of lodging houses
and greasy restaurants, teeming with Arabs and European refugees.
The Imperial Hotel looked
dilapidated, set in the middle of a row of similar cheap hotels and decaying
tenement buildings, with peeling shutters and cracked exterior walls. He had
stayed here before, when he first returned to
time, he had carefully waited in an alleyway across the street for almost the
entire evening, to make sure the hotel wasn't being watched and it looked safe
to enter, before he went up the steps into the threadbare lobby.
A stoutly built man, very
overweight, who walked as if his feet were precious, waddled up to the counter,
munching fresh dates. He wore a fez and a loose shabby suit, necked with
cigarette ash, his legs under strain, his heavy cheeks puffing air.
He barely glanced at his
customer's face. 'We're full.'
'Cousin Tarik.'
The man paled when he recognized
Hassan, quickly gestured for him to join him in his private office. He looked
aghast at the swollen face. 'What happened to you?'
'The army is looking for me. I
need somewhere safe to hide.'
'What did you do?'
'I may have killed a British
soldier.'
Tarik smiled. 'I have the room you
used before. You'll be safe there.'
'You have my gratitude, Tank.'
The man grunted, as if thanks were
unnecessary. 'We are of the same blood, with the same enemy.'
The room was on the second floor,
small and bare, with just a single bed, worn sheets, a cracked mirror hanging
above a chipped washbasin and jug. It looked like a large, converted storage
cupboard. Tarik was out of breath after the climb, and unlocked the door with a
special key he kept in his pocket. He pointed to a small, round electric buzzer
above the door, barely noticeable because it had long ago been painted over
with the same cream colour as the walls, stained yellow by years of tobacco
smoke. 'You remember the warning signal?'
Hassan nodded. Tarik had told him
about the alarm button under his office desk. Once for caution. Twice to get
out.
'Anything you need, tell me,'
Tarik wheezed.
'Tomorrow, I will need you to
shave me, and cut my hair. I will give you money to buy me a suit of
second-hand clothes.'
'It is wise to disguise yourself,'
Tarik answered simply.
'Remember, the room is very
private. It isn't listed on the register, and the staff have no key. To come
and go discreetly, use the fire escape at the end of the hall. No one should
see you if you're careful. I bid you goodnight, cousin.'
They kissed, Tarik gently grazing
the injured jaw, and then Hassan was alone. He undressed, lay in the darkness,
cradling his throbbing cheek in his hand, his tongue licking at the two tender
hollows in his gums where his teeth had been, his mind boiling with thoughts of
revenge.
Of one thing he was certain. No
matter what Deacon said, the American intelligence officer would pay dearly.
Weaver dropped a thick batch of
files on his desk with a solid thump, took off his jacket, rolled up his
sleeves, and went to work.
The files dealt with Axis
sympathisers, at least the ones GHQ knew about. With the Africa Corps' defeat,
all the known German agents in
German term for agents - had operated in the country was hardly surprising.
Egyptians had long been
pro-German, and scores of Nazi agents had been in place for as long as five
years before the war, furnishing their masters with a steady flow of
information, much of it of importance.
Weaver had read the file on the
most notorious. In 1942, the Abwehr put a spy ashore from a U-boat off the
coast of
His name was John Eppler, born in
father and Egyptian mother, and with him he brought a radio and a suitcase full
of expertly forged sterling five- and one pound notes. He was guided across the
desert, a journey of over 1,700 miles, by a Hungarian-born explorer named Count
Almaszy, and eventually made his way to
In the guise of a wealthy young Arab, Eppler rented a luxurious
number of alluring women to try to wheedle top-secret information from
unsuspecting Allied officers. With a codebook based on Daphne du Maurier's
Rebecca, he sent his intelligence messages to one of Rommel's listening posts,
until GHQ eventually caught up, after tracing the forged banknotes back to him.
Sympathisers were more common than
actual agents. These were people whose pro-German support was strongly
suspected.
They ranged from waiters, bargirls
and hotel doormen, belly dancers and taxi drivers, to minor diplomats, neutral
businessmen, Egyptian army officers with pro-fascist leanings, and even senior
members of the Egyptian government. Some were nationalists - Moslem Brotherhood
extremists or patriots, prepared to help any enemy rid their country of the
British - while others simply did it for the excitement or the money. Many more
sympathisers were known to exist among the 100,000 strong foreign community
residing in
some of whom were war refugees or displaced persons, either planted by the
Nazis or willingly pro-German.
During the 'flap' of spring and
summer 1942, when the British feared defeat, they had rounded up and interned
anyone suspected of working for the Axis. But scores of suspects had escaped
the net because of lack of any reasonable evidence, or had simply disappeared
before they could be arrested, and it was these files that Weaver went through
one by one. It was all very well for General Clayton to tell him he had to
track down the Arab spy. But what kind of person was he, how was he
masquerading, and what was his modus operands Still, he was determined to find
the man who had tried to kill him. Four hours later he hadn't got through all
the files but had picked out a half-dozen suspected Nazi sympathisers - five
Egyptians and a Turkish businessman - whose descriptions vaguely resembled the
Arab.
There was a knock on the door and
Helen Kane came in, carrying an enamel mug of coffee. 'I thought you could do
with this.'
'Thanks. Haven't you finished your
duty yet?'
'I was just about to leave.
Feeling any better?'
Weaver had ignored the doctor's
advice to rest up, and was paying the price; his neck felt as if it were on
fire. 'Not much.’
She hesitated, said tentatively,
'If it's any consolation I could cook you dinner tonight after you finish up
here.' She smiled. 'I forgot, you have to stick to liquids. Still, I'm sure I
could rustle up something. Even a drink, if that's allowed?'
'That's very kind of you, Helen.
You're sure it's not any trouble?'
'If it was, I wouldn't have asked.
I'll give you the address of my flat.'
As she finished writing the
address and handed it to him, the door opened again and Sanson came in, a
folder under his arm.
He noticed her hand the slip of
paper to Weaver, and reddened slightly. 'Not gone yet, Helen?'
'I was just leaving.'
When Helen Kane had gone, Sanson
said sharply, 'Well, have you had any luck, Weaver?'
'Have a look at these.'
Sanson took the folder from under
his arm, sat in one of the chairs and studied the files Weaver handed him. 'At
a guess, they're probably harmless enough. Most Arab sympathisers are bloody
useless to
and have a look at their faces.'
Weaver had already questioned the
guards on duty at the residency. Nothing unusual had been logged in the shift
reports, but the duty officer admitted that on Wednesday evening, about nine,
he thought he had heard a noise like a door banging in one of the ground-floor
rooms. He had personally searched the entire building but found nothing amiss.
It was something but nothing, Weaver reflected. 'What about the hotels and
lodging houses?'
'We're still checking, but it's
going to take at least another day or two before we get through them all. So
far, we've drawn a blank. As for the tenement landlord, according to his wife
he's in Alex on business. He's not due back for a couple of days, but we'll try
and locate him in the meantime.' Sanson picked up the folder he'd brought, and
Weaver noticed that the cover was marked in red lettering: Top Secret. 'However,
I'd like you to take a look at something.'
'What is it?'
'A record of decrypted and
untraced transmissions that Signals have picked up over the last year.'
Weaver knew that the British 'Y'
section at GHQ and the US Army Signal Corps unit based in the former Italian
colony of
recorded everything on punched tape, and signals originating in North Africa
that could not be accounted for by any of the military services were assumed to
be messages from spies, which were then sent to London and Washington for the
boffins to work on.
Sanson opened the folder and
showed Weaver a radio intercept about troop reinforcements in
agent code-named Besheeba our monitoring boys stumbled upon.'
'What's so interesting about it?'
'Apart from the fact we haven't
caught him yet, you'll see a rather remarkable coincidence in one of the
signals. But have a look at these others first.' He showed Weaver two other
radio messages recorded six months earlier. This time, they gave details of the
morale of British and American troops stationed in the city, and the arrival of
Maadi, a
'Is any of this stuff true?'
'The information's faultless. He's
not a low-grade collector of rumour and gossip - he's definitely a highly
trained pro. Look at his messages. Terse but detailed. Signals have picked him
up a couple of dozen times in the last eighteen months, but he usually keeps it
short, which makes it difficult for us to get a fix on his transmitter.'
'Do we know anything about him?'
'He provides excellent
information, probably lives in
apart from all that, sweet damn all.'
'What about this coincidence you
mentioned?'
Sanson rubbed his scarred jaw.
'Now that's where it definitely becomes interesting.' He handed Weaver one more
intercept. 'It was picked up last Thursday morning, just after midnight.'
This time the message was long,
and just a series of unintelligible letters and numbers. Weaver looked at
Sanson. 'I don't get it. It's still in code.'
'Shortly after Eppler was caught,
the Germans tightened up their operation and Besheeba's code changed. It seems
he probably switched to one-time pads which are impossible to decode.
Still, that's not the point.
Besheeba doesn't transmit that often, and when he does, the information is
usually reasonably important.
We reckon Evir was murdered some
time last Wednesday evening. Not long after, Y Section picked up this
transmission.
I'm not for a moment saying we've
linked the two events, though it's an interesting coincidence, wouldn't you
say?'
'But you think Besheeba
transmitted the signal?'
'I'd bet my balls on it.'
'Why?'
'Not only did he use one of the
same frequencies, but every Morse key operator has what the signals boys call a
signature. It's a kind of individual style, if you like - a distinct way in
which the Morse key is handled. Heavy or light, fast or slow, there's always a
certain tempo and emphasis unique to the person working the key, so much so
that trained signals personnel listening in can usually differentiate one
sender from another, no problem. And the chap who picked up the signal last
Thursday morning is an experienced fellow who had heard Besheeba transmit on
many occasions before. He knows his signature style, and swears it was him.'
'Do you reckon Besheeba might be
our Arab friend?'
'God knows, but I suppose it's a
possibility. Like I said, he's a pro, and by my estimation there can't be that
many thoroughbred Nazi spies left in
Sanson looked up. It was past nine o'clock and dark outside. He put the
intercepts back in the folder and stood. 'OK, we'd better call it a day. Let's
meet back here at six a.m. You can carry on with the files.'
'What about you?'
'There's a pile of intelligence
reports we captured when Jerry evacuated
They're stored in one of our depositories over in the Ezbekiya district. We
haven't sorted through them all yet, mainly because there hasn't been much of
an urgent need since Rommel got his comeuppance. My German's reasonable enough,
but I've arranged for a couple of translators to help me have a look through
them, first thing tomorrow.'
'Why?'
'To see if there's any reference
to Besheeba.'
'You think that's likely?'
Sanson shrugged. 'Right now it's
all I can think of. It's always possible that Rommel's people knew about him,
and were picking up his signals direct. It makes some kind of sense. At that
time, the Germans were on a roll, and they needed their intelligence
information fast - routing it through
'When I get done here tomorrow,
and if you don't mind company, I'd like to come along.'
Sanson raised his good eye. 'Are
you looking for a medal, Weaver?'
Weaver reached for his coat. 'No,
just a dangerous German spy.'
Helen Kane's flat was on
Weaver showered and changed back at his villa, his neck still throbbing, but he
was trying to avoid taking the morphine pills until the pain became unbearable.
He hailed a cab in the street outside and took it as far as the
and some exercise and would walk the rest of the way.
Taking his time, he strolled past
the Birka, the notorious red light district. It was a busy place, riotous with
noise and sound, and patrolled by the military police. The area was bounded by
white signs with a black 'X', denoting that it was out of bounds to all ranks,
but that didn't deter the soldiers. Young girls and middle-aged women leaned
over little balconies, cooling themselves with paper fans. Most ¦were Egyptian,
some were dark skinned Nubian and Sudanese, and they smiled and waved as they
offered their bodies to the men passing below, while their Arab pimps solicited
for business. 'Hello, my friend, you like that girl? Very nice, very clean.
Special price.'
Weaver waved them away. On
occasion, he'd come to the Birka for comfort, as did most of the officers and
men, single or married, but the experience always left him feeling empty
afterwards. The truth was, if he cared to admit it to himself, in over four
years he'd never got over Rachel Stern. It had seemed the one moment in his
life when he had truly wanted someone, felt deeply in love, and everything
afterwards was something infinitely less than that. He put the thought from his
mind as he walked, reminded himself he was looking forward to seeing Helen
Kane.
As always in the streets, officers
and enlisted men had an endless obstacle course to contend with. Apart from
pimps, they were pestered by cripples, vendors and pitiful begging women with
crying babies, their faces covered with dirt and flies. Urchin shoeshine boys
ran alongside anyone who looked remotely foreign, pleading for business. A
thought struck him: what chance did they have of finding an enemy agent in such
a swarming, disordered city?