Cropped hair in a pepperpot mixture of brown and grey stubble, and below were hollow cheeks.
Leather tanned skin over a jutting thin jaw lay tight on a beaked nose.
Holt watched as Noah Crane made no move towards the front door but gazed instead over the black shadow gardens, assimilating his whereabouts. The front door opened. The dog came out fast, and Holt could hear George yelling for it to stay, stop, stand. The dog went straight to Crane. Holt heard George shout a warning that the dog could be evil. The dog was on its back, and Crane crouched beside it. The dog had its four saucer paws in the air, and Crane was scratching the soft hair of its stomach. Crane picked up his grip bag and came evenly, not hurrying himself, up the porch steps, and the dog was licking his hand.
That was the truth for Holt. The dog recognised authority. When he came away from the window, Holt realised that he was alone, that Martins had left the room, gone to the hall to meet Crane. The dog had found the power and authority of the man. It was the moment when young Holt knew into what pit he had fallen, how deep was the pit, how steep Were the sides.
It was the moment that young Holt knew he stared at the face of a killer. It was the moment that young Holt knew the dangers, the hazards of the Beqa'a. He thought that Crane was unlike any man he had seen before. Something easy and untroubled about the way that Crane had walked up the old flagstone steps of the porch. He remembered how he had mounted those steps himself, in trepidation, anxious to please, fearful of what awaited him. Crane had come up the steps like a hangman, like an untroubled executioner.
God, but he was so frightened…
'Don't be childish, Holt.'
The squeak of the swinging door.
The light flooding in from the hall.
'Holt, I'd like you to meet Noah Crane,' Martins said.
Holt stood his ground, incapable of moving. He was taller than Crane, and he probably carried a stone and a half more in weight. He felt he was a beef bullock under market examination. Crane looked at him, head to toe. Holt wore a paor of well-creased slacks and a clean white shirt and a tie and a quiet check sports jacket, his shoes were cleaned. He felt like a schoolboy going for a first Job. Crane wore dirty running shoes, his shirt was open three buttons from the neck.
Expressionless eyes. Crane turned to Percy Martins.
Martins stood beside him, playing the cattle market auctioneer.
'That's him?'
'That's young Holt, Mr Crane.'
'Any military time?'
'No, he hasn't been in the armed services.'
'Any survival training?'
'There's nothing like that on his record.'
'Any current fitness work?
'Not since he came back from Moscow, not that I know of.'
'Any reason to take him other than the face?'
'He saw Abu Hamid, Mr Crane, that's why he's travelling.'
'Any leverage put on him?'
'It was his girl friend who was killed, he didn't need persuading.'
'Any briefing given him on the Beqa'a?'
'I thought it best to wait until you joined us.'
The accent was London. Not the sharp whip of east, but more the whine of west London. Crane spoke to Martins from the side of his mouth, but all the time his eyes stayed locked on Holt. Crane came close to Holt.
Close enough for Holt to see the old mosquito scars under the hair on his cheeks, close enough for Holt to smell the burger sauce on his breath, close enough for Holt to feel the coldness of his eyes.
It came from down by the side of Crane's thigh, no backlift, without warning. A short arm punch with the closed fist up into Holt's solar plexus. The fist pounded into Holt's jacket, into his shirt, into his vest, into his stomach. Gasping for breath, sinking towards the carpet.
Holt was on his knees.
'Nothing personal,' Crane said. 'But your stomach wall is flab.'
Holt thought he was going to throw up. His eyes were closed tight shut. He could hear their voices.
'If he's not fit he's useless to me on the way in, useless on the way out.'
'We'll get him doing some exercises.'
'Too right.'
Holt used the arm of a chair to push himself back to his feet. He forced his hands away from his stomach.
He was swallowing to control the nausea. He blinked to keep the tears from his eyes.
'I don't apologise, Holt. If I have a passenger then I don't succeed. If I don't succeed you'll be dead, I just might be dead with you.'
'I won't be a passenger,' Holt croaked.
Major Zvi Dan waved the station officer to a chair. Pig hot in the room with the table fan burned out.
The walk from his car into the building, and then the trek down the corridors had brought the first sweat drops to the station officer's forehead.
'I'm sorry, but again they say they will not.'
'Shit.'
'I explained that the request for reconsideration came from the Director General of SIS – I knew what the answer would be. That's the Israeli way. We make decisions and we stick with them.'
The station officer bit at his lip. 'I think I knew that would be the answer.'
'Before they make you their errand boy, have they any idea in London of what would be involved, logistically, in a helicopter pick-up deep in the Beqa'a?'
'Probably not.'
' Then you should tell them.'
The station officer reached for his notepad from his briefcase, he took a ballpoint from his shirt pocket.
'Fire at me.'
'First, what is involved in a pick-up where there are no missiles, where there is only small arms fire. You will have stirred a hornet's nest the moment the killing is made. A similar situation last year – we lost a Phantom over the hills close to Sidon. We had a pilot on the ground with his electronics giving us his position. By fixed wing and by Cobra helicopters we put down a curtain of bombs and cannon fire around him, through which no human being could move. We did that for ninety minutes until it was dark. Phantoms coming in relays, gunships overhead the whole time. Do I have to tell you how many aircraft, how many 'copters that involved? Overhead we had a command aircraft the entire time. When we had night cover we flew in a Cobra to pick up the pilot, with more Cobras creating a sanitised corridor through which it could fly. At the pick-up there was no time to land, the pilot had to reach for the landing skids, hold onto them while he was lifted off and flown to safety. That is what's involved when there's no missile umbrella.'
'They'll get it in London.' The station officer was writing, grim faced.
'But in the Beqa'a you are under the missile umbrella.
The Beqa'a is protected by the SA-2 Guideline for high altitude intruders, by the S A-8 Gecko for medium altitude intruders, by the SA-9 Gaskin for low level. If you put a helicopter in when there is a state of high alert, then you must also put in aircraft to protect it.
Those aircraft in turn must be kept safe from the missiles. For that degree of protection you have to be prepared to assault the missile sites.
'In 1982 we destroyed the missile sites in the Beqa'a.
To achieve that we had to do the following. We had to launch drones to fly where we thought the missiles were positioned, the drones have reflectors that make them show on the radar like full-sized piloted aircraft. When the Syrians switched on their radar fully and prepared the missiles, that was disclosed by the EC 135, a con-verted Boeing airliner, and the E2C Hawkeye. When we had exactly located the missile sites and had confused them with electronic jamming, then we hit them from the air with the Maverick missile, and the Walleye bomb that goes to the
