The Shield of Darius Page 19

  Since the stream was used to flood the paddies during high water, its banks were trimmed and clear until it reached beyond the fields and disappeared into the trees. Here it began to flow more swiftly, tumbling down the overgrown slope over moss-covered rocks and wet clay. As Ben struggled up into the thickness of the jungle, he slipped onto his stomach, clutching with his right hand at vines and branches that arched low over the stream, sliding back, then inching forward again. Twenty yards into the thick undergrowth, an animal trail crossed the stream and climbed diagonally up the hill to his right. He clambered from the water and crawled forward along the path. The trail was no more than a burrow through a low thicket and he felt his way beneath the tangle of vines until the path widened and he found himself below the low hanging branches of a massive tree. The giant had pushed the forest away as it grew, and he pulled up into the lower limbs, tied the chador securely under his arms and about the trunk, and collapsed back against its smooth bark. Along the coastal road he heard the distant weeee waaaa of sirens. The police had discovered the bus.

  . . .

  As soon as the door opened, Jim Cannon knew he was in trouble. It wasn’t time for his afternoon meal, and his guards had company. An officer. The man was dressed in the heavy wool uniform of the men who brought his food but was obviously their superior. He entered with a confident step that Jim hadn’t seen in his regular sentries.

  In the stifling stillness of the building’s summer heat, the uniform looked even more uncomfortable and ominous and the man had dark sweat rings under his arms. He frowned through a heavy black mustache but was otherwise clean shaven, and wore a short-billed military hat and gold, diamond-shaped pips on his shoulders, with the same bronze shield patch on his right sleeve that Jim had seen on the man who threatened to blow his head off just after Ben arrived. He took in the room with a sweeping glance, stepped quickly into and out of the bathroom, checked a clip board in his hand and spoke to the guards in sharp, guttural tones. The other men shook their heads stupidly and pointed toward Jim, one gesturing with an index finger to indicate that there was only one person in the room. The officer stalked to where Jim sat motionless on the bed and signaled vigorously for him to rise.

  “Get up,” he ordered in thickly accented English. Jim rose slowly, towering six inches above the officer’s head and forcing him to step backward. The man reeked of garlic and sweat.

  “Where is the other one?” he demanded, pointing at the empty bed behind him.

  Jim shrugged. “You mean Sager? They took him away a week ago.”

  “Who? Who took him away?”

  “Some of the guards – like those three,” Jim said, following the script he had rehearsed with Ben before the escape and pointing at the men behind the officer. The guards shrunk back in alarm. The trucker waved a finger in a circular motion beside his temple. “He was getting kind of loony. Shouting and knocking around the room. They came in one night and hauled him away.”

  The officer stabbed wildly at his clipboard with a dull pencil and shouted again at the guards who looked frightened and bewildered. Turning back to Jim, the officer showed him a full list of names in English with squiggly writing beside them; a script of shorthand-looking lines and dots that Jim took to be Arabic. The man pointed to a name near the bottom of the list.

  “Is this the man who was here?”

  Jim looked at the row of names in stunned silence. There must be twenty-five or thirty…some women. Four or five from the top he found his own name.

  “Answer me,” the officer shouted. “Is this the man that was here?”

  Jim nodded slowly. “Benjamin Sager. That’s the man.”

  “When did this happen? The guards taking him away?”

  “How am I supposed to know that?” Jim said. “I don’t even know what day it is.”

  The officer pointed at Jim’s markings on the wall above his bed. “Was it four days? A week ago? How long?”

  “About a week, I’d say,” Jim said, looking thoughtfully at his scratches. “Yup. Pretty close to a week.”

  The officer turned abruptly and pushed the guards out the door, slamming it behind them. Jim listened as the four retreated down the hall and slumped back onto his bed. At least Ben hadn’t been caught. But he must not have reached an embassy either. Must still be out there, trying to figure out where the hell he was. Or he was dead.

  Jim wondered if the officer had believed his story and leaned back against the wall to think about what he’d say when they came back. But muffled footsteps already approached the door and the four entered with another, a man Jim recognized and had hoped he would never see again. It was the civilian in the dark suit who had thrust the pistol into his mouth.

  While the others stood by the door, the new man stalked slowly about the room as if by examining each inch of the wall he could force Ben to suddenly reappear. He returned to the officer, grabbed the clipboard and glared at it fiercely, pointing and shouting. His comrade with the gold diamonds shouted back, jabbing a finger into the civilian’s chest. Without understanding a word of the conversation, it was clear to Jim that the man in the suit must be responsible for the prisoners. The berated civilian finally stamped his foot firmly and gestured toward the door, shaking his head. Still shouting and gesturing, the two again exited the room with the guards, and bolted Jim in.

  Within minutes he heard them in the alley below and pulled his stool to the window, peering down through a corner of the upper pane. The two paced nervously up and down, studying the ground, glaring doubtfully up at the window, examining the wall of the compound across the alley. They stopped beside the spot where Ben had hauled himself up to reach the chador and squatted, leaning forward to peer at the mud surface. The officer who had entered with the clipboard traced his finger down a yard long scar, scraped into the wall’s face when something had scuffed the mud while wet. Again they looked up at the window, then back at each other, and hurried down the alley to Jim’s left.

  He jumped quickly to the floor and replaced the stool at the table, waiting for footsteps in the hall. Instead the voices rose again from behind the building, far enough away that Jim knew they were in the compound where Ben had stolen the clothing. With the stool back beneath the window, he inched upward until he could peer with one eye through the bottom left corner of the unpainted glass. The woman who washed her clothing beside the step stood between the two men, pointing dramatically toward the clothes line and raising her arms in gestures of baffled resignation. Again the men looked up at the window and Jim pulled away, jumping to the floor and pushing the stool back to the table. He sat on his bed, heart throbbing violently as he envisioned the search of the room. Someone would notice the broken bed or the panel. Once opened, the escape route would be clear. They would push him up against the wall next to his scratched calendar marks and shoot him through the head.

  Instead the guards came at their usual time with his evening meal and he spent a sleepless night waiting for a visit that didn’t happen. They came again in late morning, the officer and the civilian, pulling after them a pale, haggard woman whose straw-colored hair hung in matted strands about her thin face. She cowered against the wall beside the door, gazing at Jim with wild, frightened eyes. The officer with the gold diamonds still carried his clipboard and still wore the sweat stained jacket. He marched rigidly to where Jim stood beside his bed.

  “This other man…this Benjamin Sager. He has escaped.”

  He pronounced Sager as if the “g” stuck in his throat and had to be coughed up. “You remember when you first came? We warned you about this. If anyone escapes, all will be shot.” He spit the final word up into Jim’s face in a garlicky spray.

  A full night of worry had exhausted Jim’s supply and his calm surprised him.

  “He didn’t escape,” he said slowly. “They came and took him.”

  The officer’s right hand shot up and slapped Jim hard across the jaw, knocking him sideways onto his bed. The woman shrieked from the wall and
hid her face behind bony hands.

  “Impossible!,” the officer snapped. “The man escaped!”

  Jim sat up slowly, gingerly fingering the top of his cheekbone.

  “He may have escaped, but he left this room with three guards.”

  “We know he escaped,” the officer repeated. “This woman saw him outside her window.”

  Jim looked again at the frail figure pressed like a wilting plant against the wall.

  “In the condition she’s in, I think she’d probably admit to seeing just about anything. But if she’s telling the truth and he did escape, it happened after he left here. Maybe the guards weren’t guards.”

  The officer looked back at his civilian companion and spoke rapidly in their native language. The second man shook his head emphatically and argued back, pointing left and right down the hall to indicate that no one could leave the building unobserved.

  The officer in front of Jim turned his attention to the quailing woman.

  “Tell him what you saw,” he demanded thickly.

  She clasped her hands in front of the gray breast of her plain smock dress and looked at Jim imploringly. “I had to tell them. They said they’d kill me,” she whimpered.

  Jim reddened as a wave of anger swept through his chest into his face. He wanted to grab the garlic-breathing officer and throw him headfirst into the painted window glass, but clenched his teeth tightly and drew in a deep breath.

  “It’s alright,” he said. “What did you see?”

  “I saw him standing over by the wall,” she whispered.

  Jim remained expressionless. “If he did get out, it had nothing to do with either of us. Someone helped him from inside.”

  The officer and civilian again argued loudly, then grasped the woman’s arm and began to leave.

  “Wait!” Jim jumped suddenly to his feet and faced his retreating captors. “Leave the woman here with me.”

  The men turned back to him, looked at each other slyly and the man with the garlic breath began to make slow, gyrating movements with his hips.

  “You miss your other man?” he laughed. Jim strained to keep from springing forward onto the filthy little bastard.

  “Is she down there in the room by herself?” he demanded.

  The officer with the garlic breath repeated the question to his companion who nodded.

  “Look at her,” Jim said. “She’s wasting away. I can at least get her to eat something. She won’t be any good to you dead.”

  The officer shrugged, spoke again mainly to himself and pushed the woman back into the room. The men laughed, exchanged knowing glances, and left.

  She looked at Jim with wide desperate eyes and he sat again on the bed, indicating Ben’s cot across the room. Instead she walked toward him slowly, hunching over as if searching for something on the floor. As she reached him she dropped to her knees and leaned across his lap, her stick arms wrapped about his legs and her face buried against his hip. Gently Jim placed a large hand on the woman’s frail back and with the other, brushed strands of limp hair away from her colorless face.

  “Come up here,” he said and she rose and sat facing him with legs and hips curled under her on the bed. He pulled her to his chest and rocked her slowly.

  “Sing to me,” she whispered in a child’s voice, and he rocked in silence for a moment, then lifted his white head and like the purr of a great shaggy kitten, began to murmur a lullaby learned as his own mother rocked him to sleep.

  My pigeon house I open wide and let my pigeons free.

  They fly so high they reach the sky, and light in the tallest tree.”

  As he sang, he held again in his arms the tender childhood warmth of his daughters, and tears ran freely down his creased cheeks and ragged beard onto the neck of the still nameless woman. She wrapped her arms around him and sobbed and together they rocked and cried and listened to the halting murmur of Jim’s lullaby, waiting for Ben Sager to bring their deliverance.

  TWENTY-TWO

  A skilled intelligence analyst with all of the information in front of him might have been able to piece the plan together. None did. Even Christopher Falen who had anticipated the result could not figure out how David Ishmael and his Mossad colleagues pulled it off. Falen did recognize, however, that the hijacked KLM Flight 814 bound from Athens to Bombay had something to do with the strike.

  To all but a single air traffic controller monitoring activity over the Mediterranean north of Cyprus, the takeoff and climb out of Flight 814 appeared to be purely routine. Ten minutes after takeoff as the giant blue and white 747 climbed over the Cyclades toward twenty-five thousand feet, the controller noticed an Israeli four-ship formation of American built F-16s on a routine training mission above the south Aegean, closing rapidly on the commercial airliner.

  “Red Flight Leader, confirm altitude at flight level three three zero,” The controller said, watching the small coded blocks converge on his scope.

  “Affirmative, Athens. Level at three three zero.”

  “Red Flight Leader, be advised your transponder is not indicating altitude information. You have converging traffic at ten o’clock climbing to flight level two five zero.”

  “Roger, Athens. We have him in sight. He’s well below us. We’ll check the transponder.”

  The altitudes confirmed, the controller watched without concern as the two data blocks merged, then separated, unaware that the blip representing Red Flight was now just a three ship formation. The fourth aircraft had broken off and was now tucked tightly in above and to the right of the tail of the giant commercial aircraft. It was not an F-16, but a desert camouflaged French built F-1 Mirage without national markings. Its standard 1136 gallon fuel tanks were supplemented with two wing tanks that could be jettisoned, each carrying an additional 300 gallons of fuel. Below its belly hung another 580 gallon tank. The extra fuel added just over 600 nautical miles to its range, enough to reach Tehran, release its twin AS-30 L laser guided bombs, and fly southeast to the Indian Ocean.

  As Flight 814 was cleared from twenty-five thousand feet up to its assigned cruising altitude of thirty-nine thousand, the 317 passengers aboard leaned back comfortably to sip cocktails or gaze over the cottony layer of stratus clouds that blanketed the eastern Mediterranean 20,000 feet below.

  In a row by himself in the first class section, passenger Rajid Malak stood and stretched casually, checking his watch. He was a stocky, swarthy complexioned man of medium height and were it not for the oil money of the Middle East, would have looked strangely out of place in his expertly tailored suit and first class accommodation. The watch was a gold Rolex, adding to the air of new found wealth. It was 10:32 a.m. He turned and walked past the bulkheads that separated first class from economy and looked down the aisle on the left side of the aircraft to Row 27 where Leah Lavi sat in the inside aisle seat, thumbing through an in-flight magazine. Though she too was olive skinned with black hair and eyes, she seemed to have little else in common with the middle-aged businessman who stood forward in the cabin. She was in her early twenties, strikingly attractive with a finely featured face and long graceful neck that reminded one at first glance of the bust of Nefertiti. She wore a blue denim skirt, white blouse covered by a light blue windbreaker and woven sandals, and seemed to be traveling alone. The two looked at each other without apparent recognition and Rajid turned and walked quickly back to his seat. Leah too looked at her watch. There was nothing to do for another hour. Then Rajid would put things into motion.

  At 11:20 Malak again checked his Rolex. Though clouds still obscured the ground, he knew they had crossed most of upper Mesopotamia and were over Al-Mawsil, the ancient city of Nineveh. One hundred twenty miles ahead was the Iran-Iraq border and the western slope of the Zagros Mountains. He reached up casually and pressed the attendant button overhead, smiling as an attractive flight attendant with brown hair pulled tightly back into a French roll peered out of the forward service compartment and hurried toward him.

  “Will we
be receiving lunch soon?” he asked pleasantly.

  “We’re about to start the luncheon service. I should get to you in about ten minutes. Can I bring you something while you wait? A snack of some kind?”

  “No, thank you. I thought if you were beginning to open the meal containers up there you might want to look at this.” He handed her a folded note.

  She opened it and read it quickly, her face changing so slightly that Malak could not help but be impressed. This woman was a true professional. The note read:

  Please check the food containers that have been loaded into the forward compartment. One of them contains a very sophisticated explosive. This device is powerful enough to blow this plane completely apart and is wired to detonate if tampered with. Do not touch it in any way. I have the triggering device in my right hand where you can see it clearly, and an associate has one farther back in the plane, should you try to disarm me. Please take this note to the captain and let me know when you are ready to follow my instructions.

  The attendant looked down at Malak’s hand and he opened it to reveal what looked like a small calculator. She turned and hurriedly climbed the stairs to the upper level and the flight deck. Moments later, two other attendants rushed back down the stairs and into the forward storage compartment, disappearing for only a moment before stepping back into the aisle and looking at Malak with ashen faces. One walked hastily to the rear of the plane while the other returned upstairs to report that she had found the bomb.

  Rajid smiled faintly. Despite the rigid security in Athens, his people had succeeded in getting the device onto the catering truck and into the plane undetected.

  In less than five minutes the attendant returned to his seat and bent beside him in the aisle.

  “What would you like?” she asked quietly, a smile frozen on her strong, attentive face.

  Rajid knew that on the flight deck, the pilot had now dialed the emergency hijack code into his transponder, alerting controllers on the ground to his plight. He had probably also spoken to the ground and other pilots in the vicinity, explaining the nature of the emergency. Malak handed the attendant the second note.