Authors: Robert Ludlum
She tried to think back, to reconstruct how he had snared her, but the steps were blurred because she had not thought about it at the time. She had no reason whatsoever to doubt that Tony MacDonald, the alcoholic cipher, was beside himself at the thought of traveling to Oman alone without someone knowledgeable with him. He had complained several times, nearly trembling, that his firm had accounts in Masqat and he was expected to service them despite the horrors going on over there. She had replied—several times—with comforting words that it was basically a U.S.-Israeli problem, not a British one, so he would not be harmed. It was as though he had expected her to
be sent there, and when the orders came she had remembered his fears and telephoned him, believing he was her perfect escort to Oman. Oh, just
perfect
!
My God, what a network he must have! she thought. A little over an hour ago he was supposedly paralyzed with alcohol, making an ass of himself in a hotel bar, and here he was at five o’clock in the morning following her in a large blacked-out sedan. One assumption was unavoidable: he had put her under twenty-four-hour surveillance and picked her up after she had driven out of the palace gate, which meant that his informers had unearthed her connection to the sultan of Oman. But for
whom
was the profoundly clever MacDonald playing out his charade, a cover that gave him access to an efficient Omani network of informers and drivers of powerful automobiles at any hour of the day and night in this besieged country where every foreigner was put under a microscope? Which side was he on, and if it was the wrong one, for how many years had the ubiquitous Tony MacDonald been playing his murderous game?
Who was behind him? Did this contradictory Englishman’s visit to Oman have anything to do with Evan Kendrick? Ahmat had spoken cautiously, abstractly, about the American congressman’s covert objective in Masqat but would not elaborate other than to say that no theory should be overlooked no matter how implausible it seemed. He revealed only that the former construction engineer from Southwest Asia believed that the bloody seizure of the embassy
might
be traced to a man and an industrial conspiracy whose origins were perceived four years ago in Saudi Arabia—perceived, not proven. It was far more than she had been told by her own people. Yet an intelligent, successful American did not risk going undercover among terrorists without extraordinary convictions. For Ahmat, sultan of Oman and fan of the New England Patriots, this was enough. Beyond routing him here, Washington would not acknowledge him, would not help him. “But we can,
I
can!” Ahmat had exclaimed. And now Anthony MacDonald was a profoundly disturbing factor in the terrorist equation.
Her professional instincts demanded that she walk away,
race
away, but Khalehla could not do that. Something had happened,
someone
had altered the delicate balances of past and impending violence. She would not call for a small jet to fly her out of an unknown rock-based plateau to Cairo. Not yet. Not
yet
. Not now! There was too much to learn and so little time! She could not stop!
* * *
“Don’t stop!” roared the obese MacDonald, clutching the hand strap above his seat as he yanked his heavy body upright in the sedan. “She was driving out here for a reason, certainly not for pleasure at this hour.”
“She may have seen you,
Effendi
.”
“Not likely, but if she did I’m merely a buggered-off client tricked by a whore. Keep going and switch on your lights. Someone may be waiting for them and we have to know who it is.”
“Whoever it is may be unfriendly, sir.”
“In which case I’m just another drunken infidel you’ve been hired by the firm to protect from his own outrageous behavior. No different from other times, old sport.”
“As you wish,
Effendi
.” The driver turned on the headlights.
“What’s up ahead?” asked MacDonald.
“Nothing, sir. Only an old road that leads down to the Jabal Sham.”
“What the hell is that?”
“The start of the desert. It ends with the far-off mountains that are the Saudi borders.”
“Are there other roads?”
“A number of kilometers to the east and less passable, sir, very difficult.”
“When you say there’s nothing up ahead, exactly what do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said, sir. Only the road to the Jabal Sham.”
“But this road, the one we’re on,” pressed the Englishman. “Where does
it
go?”
“It does not, sir. It turns left into the road down to the—”
“This Jabal-whatever,” completed MacDonald, interrupting. “I see. So we’re not talking about two roads, but one that happens to head left down to your bloody desert.”
“Yes, sir—”
“A
rendezvous
,” broke in the Mahdi’s conduit, whispering to himself. “I’ve changed my mind, old boy,” he continued quickly. “Douse the damned headlights. There’s enough of a moon for you to see, isn’t there?”
“Oh, yes!” replied the driver in minor triumph while turning off the lights. “I know this road very well. I know every road in Masqat and Matrah very,
very
well. Even the unpassable ones to the east and to the south. But I must say,
Effendi
, I do not understand.”
“Quite simple, my boy. If our busy little whore didn’t head down to whatever and whomever she intended to reach, someone else will come up here—before the light does, I expect, which won’t be too long now.”
“The sky brightens quickly, sir.”
“Quite so.” MacDonald placed his pistol on top of the dashboard, reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a short pair of binoculars with bulging, thickly coated lenses. He brought them to his eyes and scanned the area ahead through the windshield.
“It is still too dark to see,
Effendi
,” said the driver.
“Not for these little dears,” explained the Englishman as they approached another curve in the dim moonlight. “Black out the entire sky and I’ll count you the number of those stubby trees a thousand meters away.” They rounded the sharp curve, the driver squinting and braking the large sedan. The road was now straight and flat, disappearing into the darkness ahead.
“Another two kilometers and we reach the descent into the Jabal Sham, sir. I will have to go very slowly, as there are many turns, many rocks—”
“Good
Christ
!” roared MacDonald, peering through the infrared binoculars. “Get off the road!
Quickly!
”
“What, sir?”
“Do as I say! Cut your engine!”
“Sir?”
“Turn it
off
! Coast as far as you can into the sand grass!”
The driver swung the car to the right, lurching over the hard, rutted ground, gripping the wheel and spinning it repeatedly to avoid the scattered squat trees barely seen in the night light. Seventy-odd feet into the grass the sedan came to a jolting stop; an unseen, gnarled tree close to the ground had been caught in the undercarriage.
“Sir …?”
“Be
quiet
!” whispered the obese Englishman, replacing the binoculars in his pocket and reaching for his weapon above the dashboard. With his free hand he grabbed the door handle, then abruptly stopped. “Do the lights go on when the door is opened?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” answered the driver, pointing to the roof of the car. “The overhead light, sir.”
MacDonald smashed the barrel of his pistol into the glass of the ceiling light. “I’m going outside,” he said, again whispering. “Stay here, stay still and stay the hell away from the damned
horn. If I hear a sound you’re a dead man, do you
understand
me?”
“Clearly, sir. In case of an emergency, however, may I ask why?”
“There are men on the road up ahead—I couldn’t say whether three or four; they were just specks—but they’re coming this way and they’re running.” Silently the Englishman opened the door and rapidly, uncomfortably, climbed out. Staying as close to the ground as possible, he made his way swiftly across the sand grass to within twenty feet of the road. In his dark suit and black silk shirt, he lowered his bulk beside the stub of a dwarfed tree, put his weapon to the right of the twisted trunk, and took the infrared binoculars out of his pocket. He trained them on the road, in the path of the approaching figures. Suddenly they were there.
Blue!
It was
Azra
. Without his beard but unmistakable! The junior member of the council, brother of Zaya Yateem, the only set of brains on that council. And the man on his left … MacDonald could not recall the name, but he had studied the photographs as though they were his passage to infinite wealth—which they were—and he knew it was
he
. A Jewish name, an older man, a terrorist for nearly twenty years … Yosef? Yes,
Yosef
! Trained in the Libyan forces after fleeing the Golan Heights.… But the man on Azra’s left was puzzling; because of his appearance the Englishman felt he should know him. Focusing the infrared lenses on the bouncing, rushing face, MacDonald was perplexed. The running man was nearly as old as Yosef, and the few people in the embassy over thirty years of age were basically there for a reason known to Bahrain; the remainder were imbeciles and hotheads—fundamentalist zealots easily manipulated. Then MacDonald noticed what he should have seen at first: the three men were in prison clothes. They were escaped
prisoners
. Nothing made sense! Were these the men the whore, Khalehla, was racing to meet? If so, everything was doubly incomprehensible. The bitch-whore was working for the enemy out of Cairo. The information was confirmed in Bahrain; it was irrefutable! It was why he had cultivated her, repeatedly telling her of his firm’s interests in Oman and how frightened he was to go there under the circumstances and how grateful he would be for a knowledgeable companion. She had swallowed the bait, accepting his offer, even to the point of insisting that she could not leave Cairo until a specific day, a specific time, which meant a very specific flight, of which there was only one
a day. He had phoned Bahrain and was told to comply. And
watch her
, which he did. There was no meeting with anyone, no hint of eye contact whatsoever. But in the chaos of Masqat’s security-conscious immigration she had strayed away. Damn!
Damn!
She had wandered—
wandered
—out to the air-freight warehouse, and when he found her she was alone by her petulant self. Had she made contact with someone there, passed instructions to the enemy? And if she had, did either have anything to do with the escaped prisoners now racing up the road?
That there was a connection would seem to be irrefutable. And totally out of place!
As the three figures passed him a perspiring Anthony MacDonald pushed himself off the ground, grunting as he got to his feet. Reluctantly—
very
reluctantly—understanding that millions upon millions could depend on the next few hours, he reached a conclusion: the sudden enigma that was Khalehla had to be resolved, and the answers he so desperately needed were inside the embassy. Not only could the millions be lost without those answers, but if the bitch-whore was pivotal to some hideous coup and he failed to stop her, it was entirely possible that Bahrain would order his execution. The Mahdi did not suffer failure.
He had to get inside the embassy and all the hell that it stood for.
The Lockheed C-130 Hercules with Israeli insignia cruised at thirty-one thousand feet above the Saudi desert east of Al Ubaylah. The flight plan from Hebron was an evasive one: south across the Negev into the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea, proceeding south again equidistant from the coasts of Egypt, the Sudan and Saudi Arabia. At Hamdanah the course change was north-northeast, splitting the radar grids between the airports in Mecca and Qal Bishah, then due east at Al Khurmah into the Rub al Khali desert in southern Arabia. The plane had refueled in midair out of the Sudan west of Jiddah over the Red Sea; it would do so again on the return flight, without, however, its five passengers.
They sat in the cargo hold, five soldiers in coarse civilian clothes, each a volunteer from the little-known elite Masada Brigade, a strike force specializing in interdiction, rescue, sabotage and assassination. None was over thirty-two years of age, and all were fluent in Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic and English. They were superb physical specimens, deeply bronzed from their
desert training, and imbued with a discipline that demanded split-second decisions based on instantaneous reactions; each had an intelligence quotient in the highest percentile, and all were motivated in the extreme, for all had suffered in the extreme—either they themselves or their immediate families. Although they were capable of laughing, they were better at hating.
They sat, leaning forward, on a bench on the port side of the aircraft absently fingering the straps of their parachutes, which had only recently been mounted on their backs. They talked quietly among themselves—that is to say, four talked, one did not. The silent man was their leader; he was sitting in the forward position and stared blankly across at the opposite bulkhead. He was perhaps in his late twenties with hair and eyebrows bleached a yellowish-white by the unrelenting sun. His eyes were large and dark brown, his cheekbones high, fencing a sharp Semitic nose, his lips thin and firmly set. He was neither the oldest nor the youngest of the five men, but he
was
their leader; it was in his face, in his eyes.
Their assignment in Oman had been ordered by the highest councils of Israel’s Defense Ministry. Their chances of success were minimal, the possibility of failure and death far greater, but the attempt had to be made. For among the two hundred thirty-six remaining hostages held inside the American embassy in Masqat was a deep-cover field director of the Mossad, Israel’s unparalleled intelligence service. If he was discovered, he would be flown to any one of a dozen “medical clinics” of both friendly and unfriendly governments where intravenous chemicals would be far more effective than torture. A thousand secrets could be learned, secrets that could imperil the state of Israel and emasculate the Mossad in the Middle East. The objective:
Get him out if you can. Kill him if you cannot
.