“Not for three days from now. Tomorrow. What’s free?”

The flight sergeant went to a computer console and tapped out the inquiry.

“Nothing, sir. Booked solid, every unit.”

“Can’t we divert a squadron?”

“Not really. Because of the Scud-hunting, we have a backlog. Oh, hold on, there’s the Forty-three Hundred down at Diego. They have capacity.”

“Okay, give it to the Buffs.”

“If you’ll forgive my saying so,” remarked the NCO, with that elaborately courteous phrasing that masks a disagreement, “the Buffs are not exactly precision bombers.”

“Look, Charlie, in twenty-four hours those Iraqis will have cleaned the place out. We have no choice.

Give it to the Buffs.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mike Martin was too restless to hole up in the Soviet compound for more than a few days. The Russian steward and his wife were distraught, sleepless at night because of the endless cacophony of falling bombs and rockets coupled with the roar of Baghdad’s limitless but largely ineffective antiaircraft fire.

They yelled imprecations out of the windows at all American and British fliers, but they were also running out of food, and the Russian stomach is a compelling argument. The solution was to send Mahmoud the gardener to do their shopping again.

Martin had been pedaling around the city for three days when he saw the chalk mark. It was on the rear wall of one of the old Khayat houses in Karadit-Mariam, and it meant that Jericho had delivered a package to the corresponding dead-letter box.

Despite the bombing, the natural resilience of ordinary people trying to get on with their lives had begun to assert itself. Without a word being spoken, save in muttered undertones and then only to a family member who would not betray the speaker to the AMAM, the realization had dawned on the working class that the Sons of Dogs and the Sons of Naji seemed to be able to hit what they wanted to hit and leave the rest alone.

After five days the Presidential Palace was a heap of rubble. The Defense Ministry no longer existed, nor did the telephone exchange or the principal generating station. Even more inconveniently, all nine bridges now decorated the bottom of the Tigris, but an array of small entrepreneurs had established ferry services across the river, some large enough to take trucks and cars, some punts carrying ten passengers and their bicycles, some mere rowboats.

Most major buildings remained untouched. The Rashid Hotel in Karch was still stuffed with foreign press people, even though the Rais was assuredly in his bunker beneath it. Even worse, the headquarters of the AMAM, a collection of linked houses with old frontages and modernized interiors in a blocked-off street near Qasr-el-Abyad in Risafa, was safe. Beneath two of those houses was the Gymnasium, never mentioned except in whispers, where Omar Khatib the Tormentor extracted his confessions.

Across the river in Mansour, the single big office building forming the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, both Foreign and Counterintelligence, was unmarked.

Mike Martin considered the problem of the chalk mark as he cycled back to the Soviet villa. He knew his orders were formal—no approach. Had he been a Chilean diplomat called Benz Moncada he would have obeyed that instruction, and he would have been right. But Moncada had not been trained to lie immobile, if necessary for days, in a single observation post and watch the surrounding countryside until even the birds nested on his hat.

That night, on foot, Martin recrossed the river into Risafa as the air raids began and made his way to the vegetable market at Kasra. There were figures on the sidewalks here and there, scurrying toward shelter as if their humble dwellings would ward off a Tomahawk cruise and he were merely one of them. More important, his gamble regarding the AMAM patrols was paying off: they too had no taste for the open streets with the Americans overhead.

He found his observation position on the roof of a fruit warehouse, from whose edge he could see the street, the wall of the vegetable market, and the brick and the flagstone that marked the drop. For eight hours, from eightP.M. until four in the morning, he lay and watched.

If the drop were staked out, the AMAM would not have used less than twenty men. In all that time there would have been the scuffle of a boot on stone, a cough, a shifting of cramped muscles, a scrape of match, the glow of a cigarette, the guttural order to stub it out; there would have been something. He simply did not believe that Khatib’s or Rahmani’s people could remain immobile and silent for eight hours.

Just before fourA.M. , the bombing stopped. There were no lights in the market below. He checked again for a camera mounted in a high window, but there were no high windows in the area. At ten past four he slipped off his roof, crossed the alley, a piece of blackness in a dark gray dish-dash moving through blackness, found the brick, removed the message, and was gone.

He came over the wall of First Secretary Kulikov’s compound just before dawn and was in his shack before anyone stirred.

The message from Jericho was simple: He had heard nothing for nine days. He had seen no chalk marks.

Since his last message there had been no contact. No fee had arrived in his bank account. Yet his message had been retrieved; he knew this because he had checked. What was wrong?

Martin did not transmit the message to Riyadh. He knew he should not have disobeyed orders, but he believed that he, not Paxman, was the man on the spot and he had the right to make some decisions for himself. His risk that night had been a calculated one; he had been pitting his skills against men he knew to be inferior at the covert game. Had there been one hint the alley was under surveillance, he would have been gone as he had come, and no one would have seen him.

It was possible that Paxman was right and Jericho was compromised. It was also possible Jericho had simply been transmitting what he had heard Saddam Hussein say. The sticking point was the million dollars that the CIA refused to pay. Martin crafted his own reply.

He said that there had been problems caused by the start of the air war but that nothing was wrong that a little more patience would not sort out. He told Jericho that the last message had indeed been picked up and transmitted, but that he, Jericho, as a man of the world, would realize that a million dollars was a very large sum and that the information had to be checked out. This would take a little longer. Jericho should keep cool in these troubled times and wait for the next chalk mark to alert him to a resumption of their arrangement.

During the day Martin lodged the message behind the brick in the wall by the stagnant moat of the citadel in Aadhamiya, and in the dusk made, his chalk mark on the rusty red surface of the garage door in Yarmuk.

Twenty-four hours later, the chalk mark had been expunged. Each night Martin tuned in to Riyadh but nothing came. He knew his orders were to escape from Baghdad and that his controllers were probably waiting for him to cross the border. He decided to wait it out a little longer.

Tags: Frederick Forsyth Thriller
Source: readsnovelonline.net