forward.
He had seen two of the recruits fighting, teeth and boots and fists. He could remember the queues that he used to see outside the GUM store in Simferopol. Men and women queued outside the G U M in Simferopol without knowing what they were queuing for. Two of his recruits were fighting, and more were arguing, and they could not know for what the ten had been chosen.
They sidled around him, those ten that he had selected. Inside the ten were four to whom he had assigned responsibility as squad leaders at the camp. Two of the other six were considered to be proficient soldiers on an all round evaluation. There was one who had scored five consecutive hits in training with the RPG-7. There was one who played with wires and the forces of electricity and who understood the workings of a radio.
There was one whose twin brother had been killed by the Israelis in 1982, he would fight hard. There was one who would make Abu Hamid laugh, and who could write in Hebrew and in English, and speak the Jewish tongue.
Perhaps they thought they were going to be sent to Simferopol.. .
He waved for them to sit.
It was the centre of the camp. It was between the cooking area and the first line of the bell tents. He had prepared what he was going to say. In Simferopol the Russian instructors had always said that a commander should prepare his statement of orders and tactics.
The low sun was warm on his shoulders, on the back of his neck, the sun that was soon to dip into dusk behind the great escarpment of the Jabal el Barouk.
He was a changeling.
No longer the graduate and the diplomat, Holt was the technician.
He had no love in his heart, he had no hate in his mind.
The fine cross hairs of the Schmidt and Bender PM 12 x 42 telescopic sight did not flicker over the back of a sitting, living, breathing human being. The cross hairs lay upon a target.
He had no thought of his girl, no thought of his dead ambassador. His thoughts were on the time of a bullet in flight, and the angle of wind deflection, and the distance between the lying up position and the centre of the tent camp as measured by Crane from his aerial photographs.
With his thumb, Holt drew back the Safety.
None who had known him before would have recognised the changeling at that moment. Not his parents, not the men and women at FCO, not the staffers who had been his colleagues in Moscow… not Jane, certainly not Jane Canning.
He held the stock forward, just behind the bipod, with his left hand. The butt was pulled hard into his shoulder. His right eye was locked against the circle of the sight. His index finger searched for the trigger guard, and inside the guard to the trigger.
He took a long singing breath, forced the air into his lungs.
As Noah Crane would have done it..
'It will be a mission that will bring anguish to our enemy. It will bring pride to our people. Each one of you, of us, has known the cruelty of our enemy. We are honoured to have the chance to strike a blow at that enemy… '
He saw the glow in their eyes, he saw the fervour in their faces. He felt the swelling pleasure that he was their leader.
Half the breath heaved out.
Trigger squeeze to first stage.
'Wish me luck, as you wave me goodbye, Cheerio, here I go, on my way,
Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye… '
He hummed. The breath was pressing for release in his throat. The cross hairs were steady.
He squeezed.
Holt fired.
The path of a bullet in the Beqa'a.
'Our target is Tel Aviv… '
He seemed to rise up. He seemed to be lifted from his haunches and then punched forward. There was a force that drove him.
Abu Hamid fell, bursting blood, against the body of the recruit who had scored five consecutive hits with the RPG-7 and against the recruit who understood the workings of a radio.
Abu Hamid fell and he did not move.
20
The economic sub-committee of the Cabinet had ended.
It was a full fifteen minutes since the secretary had slipped silently into the room and laid the message form beside the Prime Minister's papers.
The chairman of the sub-committee, the Chancellor, was neatly packing away his papers at the far end of the table.
'You'll forgive the presumption, Prime Minister, but you are displaying a certain cheerfulness that I can hardly put down to our business of the last two hours.'
'That obvious, Harry?'
'Very obvious, Prime Minister.'
The Prime Minister leaned back, there was a comfortable smile. The meeting hushed.
The Prime Minister said, 'One of the hardest features of my office is to exercise real power, to exercise real influence. I try often enough, and I rarely succeed.'
'But this time you have succeeded?' The Chancellor was adept at the unsubtle prompt. 'Can you say?'
The Prime Minister glanced down at the cryptic handwritten message. 'Not yours, not mine, but Abu Hamid's, on the salver.'
'You'll keep this to yourselves of course When Ben Armitage was shot dead in Yalta, and an aide also died, we let a lie be known, that the murderer was a local criminal. We knew in fact that the killer was a member of the Palestinian Popular Front. I put in hand an Intelligence operation that located the killer in the Beqa'a valley of east Lebanon. I took the decision, not lightly, to send a covert team into the Beqa'u valley in that a precisely calculated vengeance should be wrought upon this murderer. It would be the clearest indication to his Syrian masters that we will never be attacked with impunity Last night, gentlemen, at dusk, that vengeance was exacted.'
'That's first class, Prime Minister.'
'I'll not deny that I agonised over the decision, over the consequences of failure, for which of course I would have taken the blame, but if you venture nothing then you win nothing. This government, our government, has shown that we are in the forefront of the war against international terrorism.'
'You are to be most warmly congratulated, Prime Minister.'
'Thank you, I accept your congratulations with pleasure, and later, when I telephone him I anticipate receiving the congratulations of the President of the United States. We are not a nation of boasters, gentlemen, I like to think we are a nation of quiet achievers
… it's been a good meeting. Thank you, Harry.'
Major Said Hazan was buried with full military honours in that section of the military cemetery reserved for Air Force officers who had died in the service of the Syrian Arab Republic. There was a large turnout of dignitaries and senior ranking officers. The cause of death, as announced in the Damascus morning newspapers, was given as heart failure brought on by the ravages of an old war wound, bravely borne. Amongst those who carried the coffin to the deep cut grave was Fawzi. He wore a new uniform for the occasion, and the uniform carried the insignia of a captain, and the brigadier who headed Air Force Intelligence and who was the pall-bearer immediately ahead of Fawzi, had told the young man that in the circumstances he was right to have shot the Jew. And no doubt the brave major had been so severely injured in his throat that the Jew's very first assault was fatal.
After the service, after the mourners had dispersed, after the band and the honour guard had been bussed
