“I’ll need their definite date,” said Baxeter.
“Why?” asked Janet.
“It’s important.”
“Why?” she repeated.
“Trust me.”
“Will you have to go back to Beirut?”
“Maybe not this time.”
“How long?”
Baxeter pulled down the corners of his mouth. “Maybe forty-eight hours.”
Over and finished in days, she remembered. What, exactly, would be finished? Baxeter left early the following morning, but this time there was none of the earlier emptiness because her mind was in a turmoil of indecision. How could she dispassionately pick one against the other! The very word was a mockery: passion had every thing to do with it. Uncomfortably, her mind held by it, Janet decided that if she were making a comparison, which was what she had to do, then Baxeter was a better lover than John. But that was only a part of it. She knew she loved Baxeter because she’d been with him: practically lived with him. It seemed so long ago with John: almost difficult to remember. So she had to have time with him again. Not for herself, she thought quickly. To be fair to John, that’s all. Was she capable of that sort of hypocrisy, going through the charade of the media reunion and all the time conducting some sort of mental trial? She didn’t think she was: couldn’t think, properly, of anything.
Baxeter wasn’t away the forty-eight hours he’d estimated. He called on the evening of the second night and met her in a restaurant in Ayios Dhometios they had not used before. He was there before her, and as Janet sat down the man said: “John is still there.”
Janet tried to think of something appropriate to say but couldn’t. “Good,” she mumbled.
Baxeter leaned intensely across the table towards her. He said: “It’s vital you understand the importance of learning the precise day the Americans are going to go in!”
“Why?”
“I’ve been to Tel Aviv,” disclosed Baxeter.
Janet frowned over the table, trying to understand the significance. “So?”
“From what Willsher told you is it obvious the Americans are planning a frontal assault, backed up by air support and whatever else from their fleet?” said the Israeli.
“I guess so,” agreed Janet. “I hadn’t thought about it to that extent: Willsher said they were prepared.”
“It won’t work,” declared Baxeter, flatly. “It can’t work.”
“Can’t work!” The anxiety flared through her.
“Even if they achieve complete surprise there’ll still be some resistance,” predicted Baxeter. “Our military people in Tel Aviv estimate that moving at the maximum possible speed-night is the logical attack time, which is going to cause further hindrance-it will take an hour from the moment they hit the beach to get to where John is, in Kantari…” Baxeter stopped, hesitating at what he had to say. “By which time John will have been moved,” he said. Bluntly he added: “Or killed!”
“No!” moaned Janet, softly. “It can’t go on like this! It just can’t. It’s got to stop!”
“That’s why my knowing the actual day is important.”
“Why?”
“We’ve decided to use the American landing as a diversionary tactic,” said Baxeter. “We’re going to send a commando team in ahead of them. We’ll get John out.”
29
J anet sensed the atmosphere the moment she entered the map-strewn room, the sort of solemnity that remains after a disagreement or a dispute, except no one looked as if they had been arguing. Willsher was in his preferred chair, at the center of the table, and the soldier who had interrupted them on the previous occasion was by the furthest blackboard, where the maps had been coordinated with photographs. He still wore his unmarked fatigues. Knox was at the window. He gave Janet the briefest welcoming smile and then looked back at the fourth man in the room, who was sitting alongside Willsher. He was elderly, with a hedge of straggling white hair around a bald dome. He wore half-rim spectacles low on his nose and a crumpled, neglected sports jacket over an equally crumpled and neglected checked sports shirt, without a tie.
The man stopped talking when Janet entered the room, looking expectantly towards her. Willsher stood, holding out his hand in invitation towards a chair opposite them and said: “I’m glad you’re here, Ms. Stone: seems there is something we haven’t allowed for.” The CIA official half-turned to the man beside him. “Professor Robards,” he said in introduction.
“What hasn’t been allowed for?” asked Janet, not sitting.
“John’s mental condition,” announced Willsher.
“His what!”
“My specialty is the psychological affect of long incarceration,” explained Robards. “I’ve worked with some of the men imprisoned by the North Vietnamese during the war. And latterly tried to expand it to include the traumas likely to be suffered by kidnap victims such as John: people who’ve spent time possibly in solitary confinement, possibly experiencing some degree of torture and certainly with captors they identify as enemies, not knowing if at any moment they are going to be killed.”
Robards had an unemotional, scholarly delivery, talking as if to a class of students. Janet considered it altogether too sterile and distant. She said: “You think John will be traumatized?”
“It’s inevitable,” said the psychologist, flatly. “The only uncertainty is to what degree. He could have the mental strength to recover in a day: alternately it could take months and maybe even require psychiatric treatment.”
Janet looked at Willsher, remembering. “You told me he could stand it!” she said.
“I thought he would be able to,” said the man, apologetically. “I didn’t know.”
“No one knows,” reiterated Robards. “I’ve encountered men built like trees whom I would have bet could withstand any sort of stress, but who have collapsed almost at once and taken years to recover. And wimpy little guys weighing ninety pounds who’ve taken everything and walked away without a mental mark.”
“Is that why you’re here, to treat him?” Janet asked.
“Langley thought it might be a precaution,” said Willsher, answering for the man.
“And I’m glad you’re here, too,” Robards said to her.
“Why?”
“Like I told you, John’s spent quite a lot of time not knowing what to expect from one minute to the next. He’s going to be rescued by a commando group making a sudden assault: there’ll be a great deal of noise: explosions, shooting, stuff like that…”
“… A great deal,” endorsed the unnamed officer. “A primary tactic is to disorient with as much noise as possible.”
What was she doing! Janet demanded of herself. What was she doing sitting here, listening to these people talk about rescuing John when she already knew they weren’t going to rescue John at all! Tell them, she thought at once. Tell them and… and what? How could she tell them without exposing herself and Baxeter? And John: John too. John wouldn’t survive the frontal assault, Baxeter had told her. And Baxeter was an Israeli. Hadn’t the Israelis done in Entebbe exactly what was being planned here: hadn’t the Ugandan assault been used by Willsher himself as a role model? Weren’t they experts, the people who knew best? The American attempt to rescue the Iran hostages had been a disaster. She had to leave it to the experts. Janet felt constrained, straitjacketed by the conflicting demands: and she felt something else, a rumbling churn of nausea deep in her stomach.
“… John won’t know what’s happening,” the psychologist was saying. “It won’t initially occur to him that it’s a rescue. He’ll think it’s what he’s been threatened with, ever since he was seized. It will be the moment of maximum pressure, maximum terror. And then there’ll be the pendulum swing, from terror to relief when he realizes it’s the Americans coming in: that’s the likeliest snapping point, that swing from one extreme to the other…”
Stop! thought Janet: stop! stop! stop! She said: “Why is my being here important?”
“Because yours is the face he’ll recognize,” said Robards. “People held like John seize upon images that mean the most to them: that’s how they cling to reality. How John will have clung, thinking of the person closest to him in the world.”