Chip Barber arrived at the British villa in Riyadh just after midday on the last day of January. After the greetings, the four men sat and waited out the hours until they could contact Martin, if he was still there.
“I suppose we have a deadline on this?” asked Laing. Barber nodded.
“February twentieth. Stormin’ Norman wants to march the troops in there on February twentieth.”
Paxman whistled. “Twenty days, hell. Is Uncle Sam going to pick up the tab for this?”
“Yep. The Director has already authorized Jericho’s one million dollars to go into his account now, today. For the location of the device, assuming there’s one and only one of them, we’ll pay the bastard five.”
“Five million dollars?” expostulated Laing. “Christ, no one had ever paid anything like that for information!”
Barber shrugged. “Jericho, whoever he is, ranks as a mercenary. He wants money, nothing else. So let him earn it. There’s a catch. Arabs haggle, we don’t. Five days after he gets the message, we drop the ante by half a million a day until he comes up with the precise location. He has to know that.”
The three Britishers mulled over the sums that constituted more than all their salaries combined for a lifetime’s work.
“Well,” remarked Laing, “that should put the breeze up him.”
The message was composed during the late afternoon and evening. First, contact would have to be established with Martin, who would have to confirm with preagreed code words that he was still there and a free man. Then Riyadh would tell him of the offer to Jericho, in detail, and press on him the massive urgency now involved.
The men ate sparingly, toying with food, hard pressed to cope with the tension in the room. At half past ten Simon Paxman went into the radio shack with the others and spoke the message into the tape machine. The spoken passage was speeded to two hundred times its real duration and came out at just under two seconds.
At ten seconds after eleven-fifteen, the senior radio engineer sent a brief signal—the “are you there”
message. Three minutes later, there was a tiny burst of what sounded like static. The satellite dish caught it, and when it was slowed down, the five listening men heard the voice of Mike Martin: “Black Bear to Rocky Mountain, receiving. Over.”
There was an explosion of relief in the Riyadh villa, four mature men pumping each other’s backs like football fans whose team has won the Super Bowl.
Those who have never been there can ill imagine the sensation of learning that “one of ours” far behind the lines is still, somehow, alive and free.
“Fourteen fucking days he’s sat there,” marveled Barber. “Why the hell didn’t the bastard pull out when he was told?”
“Because he’s a stubborn idiot,” muttered Laing. “Just as well.”
The more dispassionate radio man was sending another brief interrogatory. He wanted five words to confirm—even though the oscillograph told him the voice pattern matched that of Martin—that the SAS
major was not speaking under duress. Fourteen days is more than enough to break a man.
His message back to Baghdad was as short as it could be:
“Of Nelson and the North, I say again, of Nelson and the North. Out.”
Another three minutes elapsed. In Baghdad, Martin crouched on the floor of his shack at the bottom of First Secretary Kulikov’s garden, caught the brief blip of sound, spoke his reply, pressed the speedup button, and transmitted a tenth-of-a-second burst back to the Saudi capital.
The listeners heard him say “Sing the brilliant day’s renown.” The radio man grinned.
“That’s him, sir. Alive and kicking and free.”
“Is that a poem?” asked Barber.
“The real second line,” said Laing, “is: ‘Sing the glorious day’s renown.’ If he’d got it right, he’d have been talking with a gun to his temple. In which case ...” He shrugged.
The radio man sent the final message, the real message, and closed down. Barber reached into his briefcase.
“I know it may not be strictly according to local custom, but diplomatic life has certain privileges.”
“I say,” murmured Gray. “Dom Perignon. Do you think Langley can afford it?”
“Langley,” said Barber, “has just put five million greenbacks on the poker table. I guess it can offer you guys a bottle of fizz.”