They are wise enough to leave such foolishness to the P.F.L.P, And in any case, these are not innocent travellers to be threatened by one man – even if I could be sure of getting him aboard armed. No, Major – they would fight, as the Israelis fight.'
He sighed. 'If we could afford to fail I might have risked it. But we can't... We have to be sure.'
Razzak paused, and his gaze settled on Roskill now.
dummy2
So I know the answer, thought Roskill.
Take, burn and obliterate – nothing else would do. And for certainty he needed the Israelis...
The Israelis: orphans in a brutal world with time so much against them that Alexander's way with the Gordian Knot would always seem to them the simplest and the safest one. And however faulty their political wisdom might be, in the one field that Roskill himself understood, their performance was unsurpassed.
And Razzak was still staring at him.
'Long-range interception?' As his eyes locked with Razzak's he felt the question mark fall away like a drop-tank. 'They could shoot it down for you, couldn't they!'
If the Syrians and the Iraqis themselves were not to be trusted, nor the Russians either, the Israelis were the only airmen in the Middle East with the men and the planes to do the job. Roskill conjured up the dedicated professionalism of the pilots he had met and their mastery of the Vietnam-tested equipment the Americans had fed them. And of all people, the Egyptians would know just how good they were: they had been on the receiving end!
'Shoot down an airliner in broad daylight – they won't hijack it, but they'll shoot it down?' Butler barked incredulously.
'It will be at night and far out of the desert,' said Razzak. 'No one will see anything.'
'And the Kurds will get the blame,' observed Audley dryly.
'But – Aleppo to Baghdad,' Butler persisted. 'It must be six or seven hundred miles to the north, the air route. Can they do it at dummy2
that range?'
'Five hundred miles, Major Butler. And they have American Phantoms. As to the technical problem of interception, no doubt Squadron Leader Roskill could answer for that.'
Butler swung round. 'Hugh – '
'Given the flight plan there'd be nothing to it, Jack. A piece of cake, as they used to say.'
And that might very well be the crux of the thing: Hassan's mind, like Jack Butler's, would be earth-bound. If he had ever dreamed in his wildest nightmares of any sort of Israeli intervention he could not have imagined any threat from the airstrips so far to the south.
But with a competent crew and a late mark Phantom of the sort the Israelis now had, the 500-mile interception of a moving dot on a radar screen was no dream. It was a sentence of death.
'An aerial ambush?' Butler whispered.
'It's been done before.' Roskill's memory suddenly came to his rescue. 'It's like David said – there's nothing new under the sun, Jack. The Americans picked off Admiral Yamamoto that way in the South Pacific in '43 – a beautiful precision job. And didn't the Germans try for Churchill when they thought he was on a Lisbon flight in '42 or '43?'
'I remember that. They killed Leslie Howard on that aeroplane,'
said Mary softly. 'I remember that as though it was yesterday. He was such a marvellous actor, too.'
They all turned towards her. She had sat there so quietly in the background, with the conversation flowing past her, that they had dummy2
taken her for granted. Except that Roskill had marked the watchfulness in her eyes as they had settled on each speaker in turn. And now she seemed very sad.
'Of course, we didn't know at the time how his aeroplane had been lost,' she continued irrelevantly. She looked thoughtfully at Audley, and then at Razzak. 'If my niece and her friends were here, Colonel Razzak, they would say you were being very wicked –
they would say that the policeman must never fire first, even to prevent a crime. Young people today aren't like the papers say.
They are really very puritan – very sure they can distinguish good from bad.'
Roskill felt a stirring of embarrassment. He couldn't see what she was driving at, and he wasn't sure that she could either. Yet vagueness had never been one of Mary's failings.
'But you don't hate them, do you – these people on the aeroplane?'
said Mary.
'Madame – ?' Razzak seemed disconcerted too.
'And I know how David feels,' Mary went on. 'Is your Colonel –
Shapiro was it? – is he like you, David?'
There was a moment's silence, which lengthened into awkwardness before Audley broke it.
'Shapiro's a decent man, Miss Hunter. He doesn't always like what he has to do.'
'I thought he might be,' Mary said. 'And if this . .. Alamut is allowed to take place, there might be war again in the Middle East?'
'Full-scale war – no, Miss Hunter,' Razzak shook his head at her.
dummy2
'Hassan's great objective is nonsense. He will not achieve it even if we fail to destroy Alamut – I agree with Dr. Audley absolutely there. He might wreck the cease-fire that is coming, perhaps, but that isn't what we are worried about.'
The Egyptian sounded as though he set no great store by the cease-fire.
'What worries us, Miss Hunter, is how he plans to achieve this thing. We don't want to lose ... anyone we can't afford to lose before he fails.'
Mary considered him thoughtfully. 'And if you and the Israelis worked together in secret this time, one day you may work together openly?'
Roskill looked at her sharply. That was more like the old Mary. It had never occurred to him that Razzak and Shapiro might also be playing another, much deeper game, and for even higher stakes.
Razzak said nothing. But then there was nothing he could say; the very idea was enough to make the Pyramids tremble.
Mary seemed to sense that quickly enough. She turned towards Audley.
'There are a lot of things that I still don't understand, Dr. Audley –
David. But you asked me for my opinion before.'
'I did,' Audley didn't sound quite so confident now. It was almost as though she was speaking out of turn. 'Go on, Miss Hunter.'
'You said I had a stake in what was happening.'
Audley blinked – that sure sign he was no longer quite in control of the situation.
dummy2
'So you have, Mary,' said Roskill tightly. To hell with Audley.
'You and I have both got a stake of our own.'
'That's just it, Hugh dear. We have to forget about Alan now, both of us. This is more important.'
'But, Mary – '
'Shooting down that aeroplane is a terrible thing, even if they are all wicked men, which I'm sure they're not. I suppose I ought to agree with my niece – with what I know she'd say. She'd talk about means and ends.'
She gazed at Audley. 'But I would say that Colonel Razzak is right, and you must do what you can to help him. I don't know whether ends can ever justify means – but sometimes I think they absolve them. I suppose it's because Father made us all read de Vigny when we were young...'
' Servitude et Grandeur Militaires?' said Audley in surprise.
Mary smiled at him. 'I know it doesn't sound like a girl's book. We had a Victorian translation of it called "The Problem of Military Obligation" which made it sound even less like one. But when I read it I thought it was very sad and beautiful, I remember – we were what used to be called a "service family", Colonel Razzak, you see. We did know something about obligations.'
' "We are the firemen, free from passion, who must put out the fire.
Later there will come the explanations, but that is not our concern."'
Trust Audley to dish up a bloody quotation.
And yet – damn it – there was something here that Roskill knew he dummy2
had missed; something Mary was sharing with Audley and Razzak, and could not share with him.