Full of indignation, the commissionaire sought to bustle the hooligans outside. No one noticed that one of the rowdies, on entering, had dropped a cigarette pack against the doorjamb so that, although normally self-closing, the door would not quite shut.
Nor did anyone notice, in the jostling and pushing, a fourth man enter the lobby on hands and knees.
When he stood up, he was at once joined by the lawyer from New York, who had followed the commissionaire down the stairs to the lobby.
They stood to one side as the commissionaire hustled the three rowdies back where they belonged—in the street. When he turned around, the bank servant saw that the lawyer and the accountant had descended from the mezzanine of their own accord. With profuse apologies for the unseemly melee, he ushered them out.
Once on the sidewalk, the accountant let out a huge sigh of relief.
“I hope I never have to do that again,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” said the lawyer. “You did pretty well.”
They spoke in Hebrew, because the accountant knew no other language. He was in fact a bank teller from Beershe’eva, and the only reason he was in Vienna, on his first and last covert assignment, was that he also happened to he the identical twin of the cracksman, who was then standing immobile in the darkness of the cleaning closet on the mezzanine floor. There he would remain motionless for twelve hours.
Mike Martin arrived in Ar-Rutba in the middle of the afternoon. It had taken him twenty hours to cover a distance that normally would take no more than six in a car.
On the outskirts of the town he found a herdsman with a flock of goats and left him somewhat mystified but quite happy by buying four of them for his remaining handful of dinars at a price almost twice what the herdsman would have secured at the market.
The goats seemed happy to be led off into the desert, even though they now wore halters of cord. They could hardly be expected to know that they were only there to explain why Mike Martin was wandering around the desert south of the road in the afternoon sun.
His problem was that he had no compass—it was with the rest of his gear, beneath the tiles of a shack in Mansour. Using the sun and his cheap watch, he worked out as best he could the bearing from the radio tower in the town to the wadi where his motorcycle was buried.
It was a five-mile hike, slowed by the goats, but they were worth having because twice he saw soldiers staring at him from the road until he was out of sight. But the soldiers took no action.
He found the right wadi just before sundown, identifying the marks scored into the nearby rocks, and he rested until the light was gone before starting to dig. The happy goats wandered off.
It was still there, wrapped in its plastic bag, a rangy 125-cc. Yamaha cross-country motorcycle, all black, with panniers for the extra fuel tanks. The buried compass was there, plus the handgun and ammunition.
He strapped the automatic in its holster to his right hip. From then on, there would be no more question of pretense; no Iraqi peasant would be riding that machine in those parts. If he were intercepted, he would have to shoot and escape.
He rode through the night, making far better time than the Land-Rovers had been able to do. With the dirt bike he could speed across the flat patches and drive the machine over the rocky ridges of the wadis, using engine and feet.
At midnight he refueled and drank water, with some K rations from the packs left in the cache. Then he rode on due south for the Saudi border.
He never knew when he crossed the border. It was all a featureless wasteland of rocks and sand, gravel and scree, and given the zigzag course he had to cover, there was
no way of knowing how many miles he had covered.
He expected to know he was in Saudi Arabia when he came to the Tapline Road, the only highway in those parts. The land became easier, and he was riding at twenty miles per hour when he saw the vehicle.
Had he not been so tired, he would have reacted faster, but he was half-drugged with exhaustion and his reflexes were slow.
The front wheel of the bike hit the tripwire, and he was off, tumbling over and over until he came to rest on his back. When he opened his eyes and looked up, there was a figure standing over him and the glint of starlight on metal.
“Bouge pas, mec.”
Not Arabic. He racked his tired mind. Something a long time ago. Yes, Haileybury, some unfortunate schoolmaster trying to teach him the intricacies of French.
“Ne tirez pas,” he said slowly. “Je suis Anglais.”
There are only three British sergeants in the French Foreign Legion, and one of them is called McCullin.
“Are you now?” he said in English. “Well, you’d better get your arse over to the command vehicle. And I’ll have that pistol, if you don’t mind.”
The Legion patrol was well west of its assigned position in the Allied line, running a check on the Tapline Road for possible Iraqi deserters. With Sergeant McCullin as interpreter, Martin explained to the French lieutenant that he had been on a mission inside Iraq.
That was quite acceptable to the Legion: Working behind the lines was one of their specialities. The good news was that they had a radio.