Barracuda 945 (2003) Read online

  The details tended to blend together, but within a half hour of publication in two special Sunday afternoon editions in Jerusalem and Damascus, the news was well and truly out—on all the local Middle East radio networks, plus the BBC World Service and the Voice of America.

  Newspapers in the United States, operating at least seven hours behind Israel, received the newsflash at around midday, which gave them a long time to prepare and research thunderous front pages that revealed that the forty-seven most dangerous terrorists in the entire history of the Arab-Israeli conflict were on the run, free and clear, and may attack again.

  Inside pages were packed with "Why, Oh Why" stories, individual cries from the heart, from "experts" on jails, security, jail inmates, bank robberies, and Middle East politics and Jewish mothers, sons, and daughters, all culminating in the inevitable . . . WHY THIS MUST NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN.

  In London, one of the tabloid dailies rounded up a couple of survivors from the Great Train Robbery of 1963, and ran the headline THIS MUST HAVE BEEN DONE BY A PROFESSIONAL. It was written with all the irate self-confidence of Fleet Street in full cry, as if they had just delved into the psychological depths of Plato.

  Lt. Jimmy Ramshawe read the initial briefs from the CIA early on that Sunday afternoon.

  Incredulous like most of his colleagues that a terrorist group had been responsible for the entire outrage, he sat in his office, consumed with thought. The sheer military precision of the operation was contrary to normal terrorist strikes. Fanatics from the desert were often brave, usually cunning, and quite frequently breathtakingly dumb. This was entirely different. This was meticulous, planned to the last detail, and executed with satanic ruthlessness, its timing perfect. Young Ramshawe thought, no bloody errors.

  Shortly before six o'clock, he stood up and muttered to no one in particular, "Nice one, Major Kerman, old mate. You really are a dangerous bastard."

  By half past seven, he was in a quickly convened meeting with Admiral Morris and Captain Wade. All three men had reached the same conclusion at more or less the same time. This could have been conducted only by the SAS or the U.S. Navy SEALs, or at least by someone trained in either Hereford, England, or Coronado, California.

  At this stage there was of course no evidence, but Lieutenant Ramshawe, along with his maps of the north Galilee area and pictures of the jail, had brought in a small file of forensic evidence appertaining to the two robberies at the New York and Beirut Savings banks.

  Buried in both reports was an incontrovertible fact, the locks on both gates, the ones situated in front of both vaults, had been blown by the intensely high explosive PETN. Traces had been found on the gate. Both locking bars had been split in the same place, and the remaining pieces of steel had shown clearly that a drill had been used to bore two holes right through the bar.

  Both these smashed locking bars had a high degree of PETN embedded in the broken area. The report did not take the matter further, and Jimmy Ramshawe had called Captain Wade to ask what he made of that.

  Scotty said instantly, "Hell, yes. They used detcord. That's a PETN explosive. But it's used almost exclusively by the military, usually by Special Forces. Christ knows where they got it."

  "Raymond Kerman would know how to get it."

  "He would. And he'd know how to use it.

  "James, old buddy, we need to know whether the cell doors in Nimrod were blown by the same method. And the Israelis are not going to be anxious to reveal anything until the fuss has died down."

  They had briefed Admiral Morris, and in all three minds, there was no doubt. The jailbreak was masterminded by an ex-Special Forces officer. Everywhere you looked there was evidence.

  They had plainly driven into the jail in the truck and then jammed it in the main gateway, having first disposed of the Israeli driver and his colleague.

  "Just imagine how carefully this was planned," said the Admiral slowly. "First of all, they had to get into the country, across a very hot border on the Golan Heights. They must have walked in at night, and then hidden on this mountain. Looks like they carried in the right kit, machine guns, probably drills, detcord, probably hand grenades. And then they got away in two big helicopters. What are the Syrians saying?"

  "Not much, sir. Except they applaud the bravery of the freedom fighters, and give thanks to Allah for the safe delivery of the Palestinian martyrs. Of the operation itself, they of course know nothing."

  "Meanwhile," said the Admiral, "we got forty-seven homicidal maniacs on the loose, some of whom might try to come here, even though their crimes have all been committed against Israelis, in Israel."

  "That's correct," replied Captain Wade. "And there's not a whole lot we can do about it. Except to stay watchful and step up all surveillance in Damascus, where the prisoners almost certainly are."

  "Okay, guys, keep me posted. I'll debrief the Big Man, and see you both in the morning."

  The phone in Kathy O'Brien's house, in Chevy Chase, on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., did not often ring on Sunday evening. She and Arnold Morgan always had dinner at home, and it was well known that this was the one time in the week the National Security Adviser tried to leave the cares of his great Office behind him.

  Right now he was about to taste a bottle of 1995 Chateau d'Issan, of which he had bought three cases, rather extravagantly on the advice of Harcourt Travis, Secretary of State and the White House's resident sophisticate.

  Arnold Morgan had no intention of revealing to Kathy the source of his advice, unless of course the wine was awful, in which case the former Harvard professor currently charged with the entire foreign policy of the United States would most certainly get the blame. Probably loudly.

  Arnold rotated his glass, swishing around the red-purple wine from Bordeaux, way up on the left bank of the Gironde River, and smelled its bouquet. Had he known where it was made, in the most beautiful moated, seventeenth-century chateau, from grapes grown in walled vineyards, he would have loved the little ritual even more. To Arnold, bottles of French chateau-bottled wine were like paintings, to be kept and treasured. But on Sunday night, he and Kathy always drank one with dinner.

  Arnold sipped and savored the d'Issan. Harcourt was spot on as usual. "Perfect," he muttered, standing the bottle just to the side of a log fire in the study. "Little more warmth, another fifteen minutes."

  Just then, then phone rang. "Fuck," said the Admiral.

  "It's for you, darling," called Kathy. "George Washington, National Security Agency, just north of the Beltway, degrees north thirty. . ."

  "All right, all right, goddamnit. . ."

  The Admiral, chuckling, stumped down the corridor to the phone.

  Kathy caught only snatches of his conversation. "HOW MANY!! FORTY-SEVEN. . . JESUS CHRIST!. . . HOW MANY THEY CAUGHT . . . ? NONE! . . . JESUS CHRIST!. . . ALL DEAD. . . ? JESUS CHRIST!"

  Kathy shook her head as she basted the roast lamb. When he replaced the phone and came into the kitchen, she asked sweetly, "Who was that? George Morris or John the Baptist?" Arnold smirked but could not smile. "I guess we'll see it later on the news, but some terrorist group just released every major political prisoner in Israel, blew up the jail, killed the guards, and got 'em all out in a couple of helicopters."

  "Good lord!" said Kathy.

  "That's what I just told John the Baptist," said Arnold. "I know it sounds kinda crazy, but there's forty-seven of these fanatics on the loose. And we don't want 'em here."

  "No, we sure don't."

  "And there's another twist to this. These guys were led and trained by some clever son of a bitch. George and his boys think it was that missing SAS Major we talked about last year. Kerman, from London. They never found him."

  "I remember the stuff in the English papers," she replied. "Rich family, but he turned out to be a Muslim."

  "That's him," said the Admiral. "And, if I am any judge, he spells real trouble. George thinks his gang not only robbed two banks for $100 million, he's just liberated the world'
s most dangerous group of men from an impregnable prison."

  "That's not good," said Kathy.

  "No. It's not . . . and the entire thing smacked of Special Forces. There were no survivors on the jail staff, no witnesses, no one wounded and left there. Everyone killed absolutely clinically. And, as usual with jails, Nimrod security was totally geared to stop anyone getting out. I'll bet no one ever gave a thought to preventing anyone from getting in.

  "First thing tomorrow I want to talk to that new ambassador who just arrived here."

  "Try to be specific, my darling. Ambassador? China? Peru? Mongolia?"

  "Iran, silly," replied Admiral Morgan, smiling and shaking his head in mock exasperation. "Iran, state sponsors of international terrorism these past twenty years . . . and birthplace of Major Raymond Kerman."

  4

  Eleven Months Later

  Friday, May 5, 2006

  Kerman, Southeast Iran

  General Ravi Rashood and Shakira Sabah sat in deep conversation in the vaulted underground teahouse of the sprawling Bazar-e Vakil in the center of the desert city of Kerman. For Ravi it was a pilgrimage, to the one place he remembered from a far-lost childhood. At least, he remembered the pastries, sweet, delicious pastries made with honey and almonds, and he remembered the covered bazaar. The actual teahouse, much more vague in the caverns of his memory, had taken two hours to find, but now they were here, and Ravi held Shakira's hand in their little booth, and told her about his mother.

  For Shakira, it was a voyage of discovery rather than rediscovery. She had never been to Iran, and Ravi had never told her much about it, mainly because he could remember so little. But he had told her about the outstanding pastries he and his mother had sampled in a place with great Gothic archways and fine, elegant brickwork, like a church or a mosque. But he could not remember the tea, or the house, or anything else, which was why it had taken so long to find.

  Today, they both wore Western clothes, and they had already visited the lofty, yellow stone Mosque-e Jame, Kerman's greatest building. Ravi had remembered that, and he knew that he and his family had lived very near. But, try as they did, he and Shakira could not locate the old house, principally because Ravi could only recall its walled courtyard, with a fountain and a tree casting shade on the stone floor throughout the day.

  Somehow, though, the bustling, noisy teahouse had made the journey worthwhile for one of the world's most wanted men and the slender, dark-haired Palestinian beauty who was prepared to lay down her life for him, as once she had very nearly done. And that was before she knew him.

  "Well," she said, smiling. "You kept telling me you would understand everything better if we could just come here. We are here—did it work?"

  Ravi laughed softly. She always wanted answers. Direct, simple answers. Shades of truth and description, nuance and allusion, went right past her . . .Do you think they should all die? Will we be safe? Are the Israelis the worst people on earth? Do you love me enough to marry me?

  The words maybe, possibly, and perhaps, and phrases like let's give it a little time, it depends on your point of view, and sometimes I think so might have been uttered in Mandarin Chinese so far as Shakira Sabah was concerned.

  "Yes, but . . ." was her standard parry, before asking the question all over again. Ravi Rashood was enchanted by her, and not just by her beauty and obvious intellect. He had witnessed her courage, her loyalty, and her determination to fight for what she believed was right. Shakira was also devout in the faith of Islam. She read the Koran to the ex-SAS Major; taught him the words of the Prophet as she had been taught; made him understand the path to Allah and the kindness and moral correctness of that vastly misunderstood religion.

  These days, even the amplified call from the minarets, of the muezzins summoning their people to prayer, held a new and soulful meaning for the former Ray Kerman. In the echoing, ancient tones laid down by the Prophet 1,400 years ago, he heard the true voice of his new religion; plaintive and suffering yet rich in faith and hope.

  And now the question stood before him. We are here—did it work? That ingrained English sense of mannered hedging, honed at Harrow School, urged him to, well, hedge his reply. But he knew that would be hopeless. Shakira would just ask again equally bluntly: We are here—did it work?

  "Yes," he said. "Yes, it did."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because I feel that I belong here. Almost as if I have come home. However long my parents spent turning me into an Englishman, I am not, and cannot be, English. I am Iranian, and my forbears were Bedouin. Neither my father nor the British Army could alter that. We are all what we are, even you, my darling."

  Shakira looked serious. "But if you had never been posted to Israel, never fought in the Jerusalem Road, and never killed two men, just to save me—would you still have one day found your way home?"

  "I don't think so. I would have gone on as before, and doubtless ended up in command of a battalion, and then gone into the family business. It was in Hebron that I first felt something in the market, talking to people. It was strange, but I felt an emotional tie, an excitement, just being there."

  "That was before you even knew me?"

  "Yes. It was."

  "So I'm not entirely responsible for your actions?"

  "No. No, you're not. I was already feeling this strange sensation, a really powerful pull toward the Palestinians. It all reminded me of a story one of my troopers told me in Northern Ireland. He was a nice guy named Pat Byrne, and he had an uncle in Philadelphia who had left Ireland when he was eleven and lived for the next fifty-six years in Pennsylvania. And then one day the old uncle—he was a widower—decided to go for a ten-day holiday to Deny, where he still had relatives but had never once visited in all those years.

  "Do you know he never went back to the United States? He settled into a typical Irish village near the sea with a couple of cousins. Then he called an estate agent back in Philadelphia and told him to sell his two cars, his house, and everything in it. He's still in Ireland, some little place in Donegal, happy as a lark.

  "And whatever he felt in Ireland was what I feel here in the Middle East. I've hardly any memory of Kerman, but my heart tells me I'm home."

  "But didn't you feel at home in London?"

  "Yes, I did. My family was there. Everyone I knew. But I think I always felt I was different and that other people thought I was different. When you're a kid you push things like that to the back of your mind. But I knew when I got here that I wasn't different any more. And then I met you. . ."

  "Does that mean we're not going to end up in Donegal? We're staying here?"

  General Rashood laughed. "We have a lot of work to do, you and I. . ."

  "Yes, but are we staying here?"

  "In Iran?"

  "Yes."

  "I don't know. But we're going to be here for some time. And even if we leave, it will be to live in Syria, or Jordan, or even Egypt. It will be in an Islamic country, I know that. Anyway, I could never return to the West, not to live."

  "They'll hang you, eh?"

  "They might."

  "Well, I won't let them. I'll blow up their silly courtroom, like that Israeli tank."

  "Then they might hang us both."

  "Not us. We're too smart."

  Ravi put his arm around her. "Smart but careful, that's the trick," he told her. "Remember, our business is very dangerous. One serious mistake could end our lives."

  Shakira looked thoughtful. "Do you sometimes think we have done enough? You know, we should just retire from the battle and go and live somewhere peaceful?"

  "I do sometimes think that. But I would like to see a great Islamic State, free of the influences of the West and Israel. Certainly here in the Middle East. And I think I know how to achieve it. Which is why we are here. A lot of people are counting on me, and I'm not ready to let everyone down."

  "I guess you shouldn't be so brilliant, my darling," she replied. "At the Nimrod Jail, you showed everyone a stan
dard of professionalism they had never seen before. Now you are some kind of messiah to half the Arab nations."

  "I can teach them," said Ravi, quietly. "But first I must show them."

  They left the teahouse shortly afterward and took a taxi back to the Kerman Grand Inn, packed, and left for the airport for the once-a-week Iran Air flight down to Bandar Abbas, a distance of around 320 miles.

  It left on time at six o'clock and arrived at the seaport forty-five minutes later. They checked into the now jaded but once renowned old Hotel Gamerun on the south side of Bolvar-e Pasdaran, overlooking the Gulf. Renamed the Homa Hotel, it still carried an air of opulence, and its restaurant, once famous, was now adequate. Just. But the chef knew how to make battered prawns with fresh steamed rice, the staple dish of Iran. They drank mango juice, and then tea, before taking a walk in the gardens overlooking the ocean.