'I know this feller,' said Pat under his breath. 'He's been here before. We all know him from the Firm.
Gilbert the Filbert.'
Before we sat down on the chairs facing Yorky's desk, Mac introduced me briefly to the man from London: 'Geordie, meet Gilbert Dauncey. Gilbert — Geordie Sharp, commander of the team.' Then he led off, cautioning us yet again about the need for total security.
'Operation Ostrich,' he began. 'As you know, this is a black operation. That means there's to be absolutely no word of it outside your own team. If anyone drops the slightest hint about it, he'll be lkTU'd immediately.
OK?'
I saw Whinger bend his head to the left and flip the fingers of his right hand upwards past the back of his ear.
He could have been scratching at an itch or knocking away a fly; he could also have been saying 'Fucking roll on!' in sign language..
The gesture wasn't lost on Mac, who said sharply, 'Don't piss about, anybody. Just listen. The aim of the operation is to take out this man.' He indicated the mug-shot. 'You'll all have a chance to memorise the face. The guy in question is General Mohammed al- Khadduri, a top-ranking Iraqi who's defected to Libya.
Our colleague here' — he indicated Gilbert — 'will brief you on his background in a moment.
'First, though, the location. Al-Khadduri is now working from a military camp on the outskirts of Ajdabiya. That's a town about a hundred and fifty kilometre, s south of Benghazi, the Libyan capital.'
Mac turned to face a map of north-eastern Africa, with the Mediterranean spread across the upper half and the Bay of Sirte taking a shallow scoop out of the Libyan coastline top-centre. 'Here's Benghazi,' he pointed with a broken-off billiard cue, 'at two o'clock on the coast of the bay, and here's Ajdabiya thirty ks inland, at five-thirty on the bay. The military complex is about here, ten ks beyond the southern outskirts of the town on the edge of the desert. All this ground immediately to the east is a training area.
'Cross-border insertion will be by”heli from the military airfield at Siwa, just inside Egypt.'
He placed the tip of his pointer to the right of a thick purple line running north to south, which marked the frontier between Egypt and Libya. 'A Chinook will put you down as close as possible to the target, but to avoid any chance of your being compromised the LZ will have to be at least fifty ks short of the camp. The run- in will be by quad bike.
'Now… timing. We have a strict timeframe, imposed on us by external constraints. The operation has to go down under cover of Exercise Bright Star, which is scheduled for May seventeenth to twenty- second. Bright Star is a major international deployment involving US and NATO forces. The aim is to establish and reinforce a simulated front line at a location in the Egyptian desert, against a threat from baddies to the south. If you like, it's a re-enactment of the start of the Gulf build-up of 1990. The exercise will involve all the NATO airforces as well as the USAF, and a considerable number of army units. That means there'll be a large number of air-movements, many of them from Cyprus, in the middle of which ours will get nicely lost.
'You'll stage through Akrotiri dressed as pathfinders — desert cam clothes, maroon Para berets and belts. As far as Cyprus, anybody who sees you will think you're umpires taking part in the exercise. Then, during the last phase of the flight, you'll change into rough civilian gear. Any questions so far?'
I glanced round the semicircle of faces. Everyone was looking hard at the map, thinking things over, but at that stage nobody had anything to say.
'All right, then. I'll ask for a few words about the target from our colleague from the Firm. Most of you know him anyway: Gilbert Dauncey.'
Gilbert stood up and began talking in a crisp, educated voice, public school but not lahdidah.
'General Mohammed al-Khadduri. You've seen his photo, and one of you I know has seen him. A big, burly fellow, we guess six feet, and powerfully built. A bit like a bear, but he's going to seed a bit now: we think he's put on a good deal of weight lately.
'His record wouldn't stand him in very good stead at the Court of Human 1Kights. For several years he was responsible for eliminating the political factions that threatened Saddam Hussein's government — and when I say “eliminating”, I mean “eliminating”. He didn't disband the dissident parties; he rubbed them out with wholesale executions, families and all. Another feather in his cap: it was he who directed the campaign of extermination against the Kurds in the north during the late eighties. The use of chemical weapons is his specialty, particularly against his own people.
'By the time of the Gulf War, Khadduri had risen to become Saddam's chief of military intelligence. At that time he enjoyed the President's full confidence, and spent much of the run-up to war with him in Baghdad.
In the first days of the air-war he had a narrow escape from an incoming Cruise missile, which hit a building when he was in the basement, but he came through the conflict unscathed.
'Afterwards, however, he and his boss fell out. We're not clear what caused the rift, but subsequent events suggest it was a basic disagreement over policy. Saddam wanted to soft-pedal things while he rebuilt his army and kept the Western powers in play, but Khadduri developed more and more extreme right-wing views. It seems that he took Iraq's defeat by the Coalition as a personal insult, and as time went on he became ever more eager to avenge it. Things reached the point at which he was going behind Saddam's back and privately inciting other Arab states to prepare for a joint assault on Israel, as a kind of reprisal. He was for a'n all-out attack using chemical and biological weapons.
'In the end, of course, word reached Saddam — and that was too much. Early last year, in February, Khadduri was arrested. It looked like he was for the chop, but then he was let out of prison on parole. He did a runner and pitched up with his friend Moammer Gadaffi, President of Libya. There, he's continued to promote the idea of an attack on Israel. In particular, he's tried to win support from Mubarak, President of Egypt, luckily without success. Worse, from our point of view, he's become a red-hot champion of the IRA.
He seems to think that by promoting revolution in Northern Ireland he can get his own back for the humiliation the Arabs suffered in the Gulf. Also, the CIA are worried that he's started supporting the fundamentalists behind the bombs on the mainland in the States.'
'Fuckin' 'ell,' muttered Whinger, maybe a bit louder than he meant. 'What an arsehole!'
Gilbert heard him and went on without a flicker: 'Precisely. Indications are that during the past year the amount of money reaching the IRA from Libya has more than doubled. Arms the same. Remember the merchant vessel that ran aground off Cork back in October? The Sirius? She was carrying containers that held more than a thousand AK-47s and several million rounds of ammunition. The manifest listed the containers as having been loaded in Amsterdam, but we believe they came all the way from Tripoli, with Khadduri's signature on the docket.
'In other words, this man has become a severe threat to the stability of the Province. He's also a menace in the Middle East as a whole. Now that he has the ear of Gadaffi, there's no telling what he may touch off. Our friends in the CIA agree his time is up.
'Fortunately we have excellent relations with Egypt, and we can use Egyptian territory as a covert staging- post for an operation. Still more fortunate…' Gilbert's face softened into the ghost of a smile. 'As of yesterday we discovered that one of you has the big advantage of being personally acquainted with General al-Khadduri.'
I nodded, aware that the other guys were giving me the eyeball. I glanced along the line and thought I'd better explain. 'When I was in the nick in Baghdad, after the patrol got compromised, this bastard used to come along once a week and give us the third degree.