He was seeing his daughter again.
Jacobson waited for the first ring of the phone, his eyes still glued to the third of five TV monitor screens set into the wall opposite him.
He was in TERCOM’s mini-situation room, a box-like affair with no windows, making it impossible to tell — but for a digital twenty-four-hour clock — whether it was day or night. He was surrounded by every conceivable device man had ever invented for communicating covertly or otherwise with the outside world. Among the SATCOM transmitter/receivers, the VLF submarine communications equipment, and the teletype decoding machines were five ordinary TV sets, each tuned to a different station.
His gaze was fixed on the one which belted out twenty-four-hour news coverage in a relentless stream of bulletins.
Cable News Network had just reported that the US Navy had lost all contact with the terrorist boat that had slipped away from the shores south of Beirut. The reporter wasn’t revealing how he had come by the information, but Jacobson guessed it had been leaked by someone in the Pentagon who was unimpressed with naval aviation’s reconnaissance efforts. That suggested the culprit to be someone senior in the Air Force. The rival services never lost a trick in pointing up the other’s deficiencies.
The media was having a field day.
As he looked on, the picture switched to the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, fidgeting nervously beside his podium in the DOD’s media room. When Jacobson looked at the other sets, he saw that they were also covering the event. The spokesman straightened his suit and walked to the microphone.
At that moment the phone rang.
‘Are you watching this?’ Newhouse asked. ‘I’ve just had the National Security Adviser on the horn. The President wants to know why he had to learn about this from the media. For Christ’s sake, Joel, finding this fishing boat was meant to be easy.’
‘The Navy was over-confident, it seems.’
‘Then what’s happened? Has the boat sunk? Is Franklin dead?’
Anything was a possibility, Jacobson admitted. Nothing was as it seemed in the Middle East. His exhaustive studies of the area, its history and culture, had provided him with that much, gratis.
‘But the Soviets believe he’s alive,’ Jacobson said.
‘They’ve communicated again?’
‘Aushev called a few minutes ago. Same message. They have specific intelligence on the whereabouts of Franklin and the rest of our people.’
‘Well, where the hell are they?’
‘That’s all the Soviets are saying, sir. They’re pressing us to respond.’
Newhouse fell silent for a few moments. ‘Has the NSC contacted you about this yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Then it seems we’re in time. We’ve got to pull ourselves out of this shit.’
‘Sir?’
‘Contact Aushev on the Romeo channel and tell him we accept his offer. We await his further instructions.’
Jacobson smiled.
‘Do it quickly,’ Newhouse said. ‘We’ll worry about the consequences later.’
CHAPTER 7
Shabanov flexed his upper arms in a vain bid to restore their failing circulation. With both his hands clamped to the top of his head for something over two hours — although not having access to his watch it was impossible to be precise about elapsed time — he had long lost the ability to feel any sensation in his muscles, which was probably a blessing. The pain was focused in his shoulder joints instead. He began to imagine that the limbs had been wrenched from their sockets, but chastised himself as soon as he became conscious of these wild and irresponsible thoughts; it was best not to drift.
‘Move again and I’ll shoot, you Russian son of a whore,’ the woman screamed in Arabic. He understood enough to stop the movement.
Shabanov raised his eyes to hers. The .45 was pointing straight at the centre of his forehead. He held her gaze and noticed the deep brown eyes flash angrily again. She was startlingly attractive. Her long black hair had tumbled over her face, but she made no effort to sweep it aside. Beneath those soft dark strands, the silky complexion, full lips and perfect straight nose were strangely at odds with the bitch’s demeanour.
‘You haven’t got the guts to use that thing,’ he said, the edges of his mouth breaking into a smile. ‘It is just a toy in your hands.’ He spoke a dialect different from hers, but it was good Arabic none the less.
He saw the confusion sweeping her face. She brushed the hair away from her eyes, cocked the gun, and rammed the barrel up against his jawbone.
‘Keep your mouth shut,’ she screamed, ‘or I’ll blow it off.’
She adjusted her stance. Out of the corner of his eye, Shabanov could see her wiggling her hips as she settled into the new position against the bulkhead of the airliner. He was captivated by the shape of her body. He could picture every inch of it beneath the rough texture of her combat fatigues.
Rarely had Shabanov felt so alive. They had told him at training school that the feeling was not uncommon during moments of acute danger. But they had not prepared him for this. He felt he could do anything, he was better than all of them. And he would take that bitch afterwards for his pleasure.
About three seat-rows behind him one of his fellow hostages, a woman, groaned. Her husband asked the man known as Mahmoud for water again. He was greeted with the light sound of the Kalashnikov’s safety catch slipping off.
‘No water till the aircraft is refuelled,’ Mahmoud shouted in English.
Shabanov thought there were four of them, but he couldn’t be sure. There was Mahmoud, the girl Layla, a lanky gun-toting youth at the back of the aircraft and another man with a grenade on the flight deck. There was always a chance that there were others, but because he had not been able to turn round since the beginning of the ordeal, it was impossible to tell.
Layla pulled the .45 away from his face and leant back. Although the blinds were still pulled down over the windows, Shabanov could see the last rays of sunlight slipping behind the horizon beyond the cockpit windshield. It was probably three hours since the terrorists had made their move. Something had to break soon.
He heard a brief commotion on the flight deck, then saw the man with the grenade beckon Mahmoud up to the front of the airliner.
The tower on the line again.
‘Fuel, I want fuel,’ Mahmoud screamed, pressing a communications set to his head. ‘If we do not receive it within the next five minutes, another hostage will be killed.’
Shabanov had not seen the execution. He had heard the man’s screams and the sharp crack of the Kalashnikov on single shot; that had been enough. From the way Layla was looking at him, he reckoned he was up next.
Mahmoud walked down the gangway towards his position, roughly in the centre of the airliner. The manual said to avoid eye contact with these people. You had to believe you were invisible to avoid being singled out for special attention. Shabanov met Mah-moud’s gaze and held it. Fuck the book.
Mahmoud looked at Layla, then nodded to Shabanov. She grabbed him by the collar and pulled him out of his seat. Shabanov twisted and wrested her grip from him. For a moment she seemed captivated by his appearance. He was wearing the full uniform of a Guards airborne assault colonel in the Soviet Army. There were three rows of medal ribbons on his chest. He was tall, lean faced, with cropped black hair that accentuated the lines of his skull. A small scar on the bridge of his nose marked the point where an Afghan tribesman had slashed him during hand-to-hand fighting in the hills above Jalalabad. Shabanov knew that his greatest strength in a hostage situation where there were women among his captors lay in his looks. They could gain him vital seconds in any confrontation. He gave her a half smile and let her catch a fleeting glimpse into the depths of his blue eyes. She seemed to draw back a little, until a low growl from Mahmoud stopped her in her tracks.