The Alamut Ambush

we knew which plane they were going to use, which we don't, no one's going to get close to it at Aleppo – not now, anyway.'

'Why not now?'

'Because Aleppo airport is at this moment sealed up as tight as a camel's – as tight as Fort Knox. By Hassan, I believe – and at no cost to himself.'

'How the devil has he managed that?'

'Very simply, Major. At this moment Aleppo airport already has a bomb scare of its own. Someone phoned up yesterday to warn them that the Kurdish extremists – the ones who haven't accepted the settlement with Iraq – are going to blow up one of the Iraqi flights. It was in the newspapers this morning. Not a plane moves until they've checked it out thoroughly.'

The Egyptian shrugged. 'It could be just Hassan's good fortune. But dummy2

I don't think it is. The Kurds have denied it and for once I believe them. You see, Major – it has the feel of Hassan about it. He's a man who likes to use others to do his own work. He likes to ride on other people's backs.'

The Old Man of the Sea, thought Roskill. Of all the creepy fairy tales, that one had chilled him most in his childhood. And again there was method in it – Hassan's method. For he would only be using Aleppo's security system now as he had used Trans-Levant and the Ryle. And as he planned to use the Arab nations to destroy Israel for him.

'I think his plane will be the best-guarded of all, Major Butler,' said Razzak simply.

'Then that only leaves you hijacking,' said Butler. 'And – by God! –

if you've got one of his men in your pocket — ' He stopped short as he saw the objection to what he had said. 'But where does that bring the Israelis in? Are you going to hijack it to Israel?'

'If it were possible, it would be the most civilised way of solving the problem, that is true,' the Egyptian said regretfully. 'But I am assured that it is one thing the Israelis will not even contemplate.

They are wise enough to leave such foolishness to the P.F.L.P, And in any case, these are not innocent travellers to be threatened by one man – even if I could be sure of getting him aboard armed. No, Major – they would fight, as the Israelis fight.'

He sighed. 'If we could afford to fail I might have risked it. But we can't... We have to be sure.'

Razzak paused, and his gaze settled on Roskill now.

dummy2

So I know the answer, thought Roskill.

Take, burn and obliterate – nothing else would do. And for certainty he needed the Israelis...

The Israelis: orphans in a brutal world with time so much against them that Alexander's way with the Gordian Knot would always seem to them the simplest and the safest one. And however faulty their political wisdom might be, in the one field that Roskill himself understood, their performance was unsurpassed.

And Razzak was still staring at him.

'Long-range interception?' As his eyes locked with Razzak's he felt the question mark fall away like a drop-tank. 'They could shoot it down for you, couldn't they!'

If the Syrians and the Iraqis themselves were not to be trusted, nor the Russians either, the Israelis were the only airmen in the Middle East with the men and the planes to do the job. Roskill conjured up the dedicated professionalism of the pilots he had met and their mastery of the Vietnam-tested equipment the Americans had fed them. And of all people, the Egyptians would know just how good they were: they had been on the receiving end!

'Shoot down an airliner in broad daylight – they won't hijack it, but they'll shoot it down?' Butler barked incredulously.

'It will be at night and far out of the desert,' said Razzak. 'No one will see anything.'

'And the Kurds will get the blame,' observed Audley dryly.

'But – Aleppo to Baghdad,' Butler persisted. 'It must be six or seven hundred miles to the north, the air route. Can they do it at dummy2

that range?'

'Five hundred miles, Major Butler. And they have American Phantoms. As to the technical problem of interception, no doubt Squadron Leader Roskill could answer for that.'

Butler swung round. 'Hugh – '

'Given the flight plan there'd be nothing to it, Jack. A piece of cake, as they used to say.'

And that might very well be the crux of the thing: Hassan's mind, like Jack Butler's, would be earth-bound. If he had ever dreamed in his wildest nightmares of any sort of Israeli intervention he could not have imagined any threat from the airstrips so far to the south.

But with a competent crew and a late mark Phantom of the sort the Israelis now had, the 500-mile interception of a moving dot on a radar screen was no dream. It was a sentence of death.

'An aerial ambush?' Butler whispered.

'It's been done before.' Roskill's memory suddenly came to his rescue. 'It's like David said – there's nothing new under the sun, Jack. The Americans picked off Admiral Yamamoto that way in the South Pacific in '43 – a beautiful precision job. And didn't the Germans try for Churchill when they thought he was on a Lisbon flight in '42 or '43?'

'I remember that. They killed Leslie Howard on that aeroplane,'

said Mary softly. 'I remember that as though it was yesterday. He was such a marvellous actor, too.'