What I had stumbled over was a heavy bulk of timber which had been bolted to the deck. A meter away and parallel to it was a second one. Both were about two meters long and the work was new; the bolts that held them hadn’t even begun to rust. And there were freshly drilled holes in them as yet unused. A shadow fell and I looked up.
“Bearers for deck cargo,” Hadaya said.
He kept a perfectly straight face as he said it, so I just nodded. Forward of the cargo hatch I could now see a second pair of “bearers.”
“There is a place in the town where we could eat if you wish,” he went on.
“Is that wise?”
“Wise?”
“I was thinking of Comrade Salah’s orders about my being recognized. No, it will be better if I go straight back, Comrade Hadaya. There is a lot of telephoning to be done and I have to report later to Comrade Salah.”
“Then I must not detain you.”
He walked with me to the car. I learned on the way that my guess about his being Algerian had been correct, that he had served as a cadet officer with Messageries Maritimes, and that none of his subsequent seagoing appointments had lasted very long. There was bitterness behind the smile. He had been recruited personally by Ghaled for the PAF gunrunning operation and was devoted to him; and, of course, to the Palestinian cause. A curious young man; not quite a mercenary but near to it.
As soon as I arrived home, I telephoned Issa and gave the necessary instructions on the subject of Maghout. Even if my newly formed suspicions were justified there was no way of stalling the engine repair. Ghaled already knew Maghout’s name and place of work. If I didn’t follow through promptly, he would do so himself, and I would have become suspect. I could not afford that. Unless I managed to retain some measure of his confidence during the critical days ahead I would be helpless.
After the telephoning I got out the chart he had given me and studied it again, along with the sheet of paper from Hadaya’s clipboard.
The purple ink used was the same and so was the writing. The course changes, then, had been plotted by Hadaya.
That was point one. By itself there would have been nothing particularly sinister about it; things would have been no worse than they already were. But it was not by itself.
There was point two. The speed of the Amalia while steaming close to the Israeli shoreline would be six knots. Six knots was the standard speed, when running on her engine, of the Jeble 5.
There was point three. The sort of deck cargo that it would be possible to load onto a small vessel like the Jeble 5 could not conceivably need lengths of four-by-four bolted to the deck to support it. Therefore, they had been installed to support, or hold down, something else. What? The Jeble 5 already had a full cargo in her hold.
Point four: there was that second track which had not been completely erased from the chart.
I remembered what Barlev had told me about the 120 mm. Katyusha rocket: fifty-kilo warhead, range of about eleven kilometres, the launcher a simple affair and easy to make with angle iron — "They don’t mind leaving it behind them when they run”.
Presumably they would not mind dropping it into the sea when they’d finished with it, either. All they would have to do would be to remove it from the “bearers” and heave it overboard.
I looked again at the second track and recalled then something that Ghaled had said when I had been arguing him out of using the Euridice. Speaking of the ship I would provide for him instead, he had told me: “It must be an iron ship and no smaller than the Amalia Howell”.
At the time, I had dismissed the “iron” qualification as an exhibition of ignorance. It had been years since the Agence Howell had owned ships made of anything else. Now, however, I wondered. It could have been a slip of the tongue, an indiscretion.
]eble 5 was of all-wood construction. Unless she had one of those special radar reflectors that wooden yachts are beginning to carry now, she wouldn’t show up clearly on a coastal radar screen. However, metal objects, particularly if they were carried on her deck, might act as reflectors. In that case, the best way for her to approach the Tel Aviv-Yafo area unobserved would be to use her engine to motor along on the same course and speed as, but just beyond and masked by, a larger iron or steel vessel. As far as the coastal radar was concerned Jeble 5 would then be invisible.
The Katyusha’s range was eleven kilometres. From ten kilometres offshore Jeble 5 could do a lot of damage. I had no idea what the rate of fire might be, but there would be two launchers on her deck. I had made a hundred adapter rings, so there would be no shortage of ammunition. Even if each launcher fired only ten rounds before the schooner turned away and the crew began jettisoning the launchers, there would have been a thousand kilos of high explosive discharged.
According to Barlev, one Katyusha hit on a hospital had killed ten persons. Well, there were a lot of hospital-size buildings clustered along the Tel Aviv beaches. Some had names like Hilton, Sheraton, Park, and Dan, but there were apartment buildings as well as hotels, and all so thick on the ground that, even with rockets fired from a ship at sea, a high percentage of direct hits could be expected.
All this, of course, was to be in addition to the charges already set to be exploded ashore.
I had told Ghaled that his plan was ingenious. I hadn’t really thought it so. There is nothing ingenious about a bomb in a suitcase or a flight bag. Killing or maiming noncombatants who can’t defend themselves is an easy game. All that is needed to play it, apart from the high explosive, is a touch of megalomania fortified by the delusion that campaigns of terror can end in happiness ever after.
The novelty of Ghaled’s plan was not in the nature of it, but in its size. A lot of bombs going off together in a number of locations would probably cause some panic as well as heavy casualties. A simultaneous bombardment from the sea would add confusion as well as further destruction. If the operation were even partially successful, Ghaled could count on international headlines. The smiles of the other Palestinian leaders might be forced, and their congratulations less than, wholehearted, but smiles there would be and congratulations, too. The PAF would have become a force to reckon with politically.
Meanwhile the Israelis would be burying the dead, and, no doubt, considering the nature of their reprisal.
I sat there for a long time, feeling sick and trying to think.
There was no way of letting Barlev know about this second part of the plan. In my anxiety to make sure that he knew about the first part, I had, by sending Teresa to Rome, closed down my only safe and clear channel of communication. I could send a cryptic wire to Famagusta and try to alert him that way; but in order to get past Colonel Shikla’s monitors it would have to be very cryptic indeed. I could not be in any way explicit. The most I could hope to convey would be a hint that all was not quite as had been expected. I had no idea at that moment what form the hint could take.
And there was Captain Touzani to be considered. It was one thing to give a captain a rather unusual set of instructions and then tell him in confidence that if, as a result of his carrying them out, he got into a little argument with the Israeli navy not to worry; that he would under no circumstances be blamed or censured and could count on a nice bonus later. Admittedly, I had not been looking forward to telling him all that, but I had been prepared to do so. What I was not prepared to do, however, was, while giving him those unusual instructions, then neglect to warn him that in carrying them out he, a Tunisian, would find himself steaming in company with, and virtually escorting, an armed vessel all set to bombard Tel Aviv with rockets right under, or possibly right over, his very nose. That I could not do.