And it had succeeded, because eight times he’d seen patrols cover the ground in front of him, concentrating on areas closer to the farmhouse, and each time they’d failed to get within fifty yards of where he lay hidden. On the last two occasions there’d been a clear sense of urgency in their searching, and he’d even heard shouting from the NCO in charge, the words whipped away by the constant wind.
But finally it looked like his luck had changed, and only six hours before ENDEX — the end of the exercise. A team of eight SAS troopers had now begun a slow and thorough sweep of the entire field, starting from the farmhouse itself and working their way, in line abreast, up the hill towards him. At least, he reflected, tucking the binoculars into a pocket on his DPM camouflage jacket, colloquially known as a ‘you-can’t-see-me-suit’, he’d be able to get some hot food and drink inside him once he got back to Hereford, and take a crap somewhere other than into a sheet of cling-film.
These troopers were shouting to each other, or at least that’s what it sounded like, which puzzled Richter, as it had done previously. Usually any group of soldiers, whether regular army or special forces, will take extreme care to make as little sound as possible. Noise attracts attention, and that is the last thing any patrol wants.
It was only when the first of them got to within twenty yards of his OP that he finally realized what they were calling. It was a single four-word sentence, repeated over and over again — ‘Safeguard. Commander Richter. Safeguard.’
The moment he could hear the words clearly, Richter stood up, tossing aside the cam-netting and the greenery he’d painstakingly woven into it so that it would merge seamlessly with the scrubby grass and stunted bushes dotted around him. ‘Safeguard’ is the over-ride code-word signalling the termination of any exercise or activity, for external or safety reasons or when directed by a higher authority.
The moment he stood up, the approaching men stopped, swinging their weapons to cover him as they looked across the rutted ground. The corporal reached him first, glanced down at the hollow that Richter had called home for the previous ninety-odd hours, and nodded a grudging approval. Officers — or ‘Ruperts’ as they were known within the Regiment — were generally held in very low regard by the other ranks, and scruffy, insubordinate ex-Royal Navy officers like Richter didn’t rate at all. To have received any kind of an acknowledgement from the NCO was high praise indeed.
‘Thank fuck for that,’ the corporal said, grinning at him. ‘We’ve been looking for you for two days, and you’re in deep shit. Your section called. They want you back in London immediately, and that’s “immediately” as in just over forty-eight hours ago.’
He was neither the best nor most reliable of witnesses, because of the money, but the story the middle-aged Filipino told was so intriguing that Tariq Mazen immediately decided to investigate it further.
His new informant worked as a cleaner in the hospital on Al-Sulmaniya Avenue. He’d introduced himself as ‘Karim’, though it was an obvious alias. Mazen understood his caution: if word of what he was doing reached the wrong ears, his informant could find his life expectancy reduced to a matter of days or even hours. And there was no point in checking him out, anyway — his value was the information he was offering, not his real identity.
The story he told was simple enough. Three days earlier a patient had arrived at Al-Sulmaniya, which was hardly news in itself, but this man had received somewhat unusual treatment. Karim happened to be cleaning the corridor behind the admissions unit when this man and his entourage had appeared. The doctor leading the group had seen the Filipino as soon as he turned the corner and had hurried forward, ordering Karim into a side room.
The storeroom door had a narrow vertical window, and most of his view was blocked by the doctor’s white coat but, as the surgeon finally stepped away from the door, for a bare second or two Karim had an unobstructed view of the patient walking slowly past.
‘Are you sure it was him?’ Tariq Mazen asked, for the fourth time.
‘No, I’m not. I told you — I saw him for just a moment, and he was walking away from me.’
‘So you saw only his profile? Only the side of his face?’
‘Yes.’ The Filipino nodded. ‘And it was grey, like in all the pictures. And his beard has streaks, too. It’s very distinctive, and his face is well known.’
That was something of an understatement. Hardly a week went by without that man’s picture appearing somewhere, particularly in the Middle Eastern newspapers.
Karim had come to Mazen’s attention by a somewhat circuitous route. Mazen himself was a member of the Special Intelligence Service — equivalent to Bahrain’s secret police force — and ran a string of informants in and around Manama. Two of them had heard whispers about a reclusive sheikh arriving in Bahrain for medical treatment. This interested Mazen because, like all policemen, secret or otherwise, he was always keen to discover what was happening on his ‘patch’, and particularly the identity of any significant new arrival.
His open-source check showed that a certain ‘Sheikh Rashid’ and his advisers had recently flown to Bahrain in an executive jet. Having dealt with this air-charter company before, Mazen knew that its management would never divulge the real identity of any of its clients without a court order, and possibly not even then. Predictably, his carefully phrased and recorded telephone conversation with the Al-Sulmaniya Hospital administrator had proved fruitless.
But then one of his informants had overheard a Filipino talking in a restaurant in the Al-Adliya district about the man he’d seen, and had approached him. As a result, the following day Karim had been waiting nervously outside the Al-Hilal bookshop on Tujjaar when Mazen drove up.
‘Remind me — how was he dressed?’ He’d asked this question before, but he would cover the same ground as often as he thought useful, until he was certain that he’d extracted everything the witness could recall.
‘I already told you,’ Karim sighed, looking at the stocky Arab in the driving seat and wondering how many more times he would have to repeat himself. ‘A gellabbiya and kaffiyeh.’
‘Do you know where he is in the hospital now?’
Karim smiled with a kind of weary triumph. ‘Yes. One of the nurses told me. He’s on the third floor, where they send people with kidney trouble.’
The significance of the treatment the mysterious ‘sheikh’ might be receiving was not lost on Mazen, though he was still unconvinced. He would have to confirm the patient’s identity, and maybe talk to one of the Western embassies — preferably the British. Despite the significant American influence in Bahrain — the US Navy has a major base at Al-Jufayr — Mazen was not over-fond of the Yanks. The British, he thought, might handle things rather more discreetly.
‘And if it is him?’ Karim asked. ‘There’s a big reward?’
Mazen looked at the shabbily dressed Filipino and smiled. ‘If you are right, my friend,’ he replied, ‘then you’d better think about getting out of Bahrain and finding yourself a new name and somewhere else to live, because people you really don’t want to meet will certainly come looking for you. But at least,’ he added, ‘you’ll have enough money to do so in comfort.’
Paul Richter walked into Richard Simpson’s office and sat down, uninvited, in front of the desk. His boss — short, slim, pinkish, balding, generally bad-tempered and fastidious in all things — was reading a red file.
Richter himself wasn’t in the best of tempers. Although the experience of lying in a damp hole for four days, clutching a sub-machine-gun loaded with blanks and watching a ramshackle Welsh farm cottage that appeared to have been sensibly deserted by its owner, was hardly the stuff of dreams, he had been seriously looking forward to ENDEX. Though a lifelong teetotaller, Richter had always enjoyed the camaraderie of a wardroom or officers’ mess, and Hereford was something special.