THE KUWAITIS
Khaled Al-Khalifa Pilot, captain Ahmed Al-Khalifa Merchant Colonel Abu Fouad Head, resistance movement Asrar Qabandi Heroine of resistance
THE ISRAELIS
Itzhak Shamir Prime Minister
General Yaacov Head of Mossad
“Kobi” Dror
Sami Gershon Head, Combatants Division, Mossad
David Sharon Head of Iraq Desk, Mossad
Benjamin Netanyahu Deputy Foreign Minister
Gideon “Gidi” Mission controller, Operation Joshua The Fist of God
Barzilai
Dr. Moshe Hadari Arabist, Tel Aviv University Avi Herzog, alias Mossad agent in Vienna Karim Aziz
THE VIENNESE
Wolfgang Gemutlich Vice-president, the Winkler Bank
Edith Hardenberg Gemutlich’s private secretary
The man with ten minutes to live was laughing.
The source of his amusement was a story just told him by his personal aide, Monique Jamine, who was driving him home that chill, drizzling evening of March 22, 1990, from his office to his apartment.
It concerned a mutual colleague in the Space Research Corporation offices at rue de Stalle, a woman regarded as a real vamp, a man-eater, who had turned out to be gay. The deception appealed to the man’s lavatorial sense of humor.
The pair had left the offices in the Brussels suburb of Uccle, Belgium, at ten to seven, Monique driving the Renault 21 estate wagon. She had, some months earlier, sold her employer’s own Volkswagen because he was such a rotten driver, she feared he would end up killing himself.
It was only a ten-minute drive from the offices to his apartment in the center building of the three-building Cheridreu complex off rue Francois Folie, but they stopped halfway there at a baker’s shop. Both went inside, he to buy a loaf of his favorite
Nothing strange in that. Neither was trained in tradecraft; the unmarked car with its two dark-jowled occupants had been following the scientist for weeks, never losing him, never approaching him, just watching; and he had not seen them. Others had, but he did not know.
Emerging from the shop just in front of the cemetery, he tossed his loaf into the back seat and climbed aboard to complete the journey to his home. At ten minutes after seven, Monique drew up in front of the plate-glass doors of the apartment building, set fifteen meters back from the street. She offered to come up with him, to see him home, but he declined. She knew he would be expecting his girlfriend Helene and did not wish them to meet. It was one of his vanities, in which his adoring female staff indulged him, that Helene was just a good friend, keeping him company while he was in Brussels and his wife was in Canada.
He climbed out of the car, the collar of his belted trench coat turned up as ever, and hefted onto his shoulder the big black canvas bag that hardly ever left him. It weighed over fifteen kilograms and contained a mass of papers: scientific papers, projects, calculations, and data. The scientist distrusted safes and thought illogically that all the details of his latest projects were safer hanging from his shoulder.
The last Monique saw of her employer, he was standing in front of the glass doors, his bag over one shoulder, the loaf under the other arm, fumbling for his keys. She watched him go through the doors and the self-locking plate glass swing closed behind him. Then she drove off.
The scientist lived on the sixth floor of the eight-story building. Two elevators ran up the back wall of the building, encircled by the stairs, with a fire door on each landing. He took one of them and stepped out at the sixth floor. The dim, floor-level lights of the lobby came on automatically as he did so. Still jangling his keys, leaning against the weight of his bag, and clutching his loaf, he turned left and left again across the russet-brown carpet and tried to fit his key into the lock of his apartment door.
The killer had been waiting on the other side of the elevator shaft, which jutted into the dimly lit lobby. He came quietly around the shaft holding his silenced 7.65-mm. Beretta automatic, which was wrapped in a plastic bag to prevent the ejected cartridges from spilling all over the carpet.
Five shots, fired from less than a one-meter range into the back of the head and neck, were more than enough. The big, burly man slumped forward against his door and slithered to the carpet. The gunman did not bother to check; there was no need. He had done this before, practicing on prisoners, and he knew his work was done. He ran lightly down the six flights of stairs, out of the back of the building, across the tree-studded gardens, and into the waiting car. In an hour he was inside his country’s embassy, in a day out of Belgium.
Helene arrived five minutes later. At first she thought her lover had had a heart attack. In a panic she let herself in and called the paramedics. Then she realized his own doctor lived in the same building, and she summoned him as well. The paramedics arrived first.
One of them tried to shift the heavy body, still facing downward. The man’s hand came away covered in blood. Minutes later, he and the doctor pronounced the victim quite dead. The only other occupant of the four flats on that floor came to her door, an elderly lady who had been listening to a classical concert and heard nothing behind her solid timber door. Cheridreu was that kind of building, very discreet.
The man lying on the floor was Dr. Gerald Vincent Bull, wayward genius, gun designer to the world, and more latterly armorer for Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
In the aftermath of the murder of Dr. Gerry Bull, some strange things began to happen all over Europe. In Brussels, Belgian counterintelligence admitted that for some months Bull had been followed on an almost daily basis by a series of unmarked cars containing two men of swarthy, eastern Mediterranean appearance.
On April 11, British Customs officers seized on the docks of Middlesborough eight sections of huge steel pipes, beautifully forged and milled and able to be assembled by giant flanges at each end, drilled to take powerful nuts and bolts. The triumphant officers announced that these tubes were not intended for a petrochemical plant, as specified on the bills of lading and the export certificates, but were parts of a great gun barrel designed by Gerry Bull and destined for Iraq. The farce of the Supergun was born, and it would run and run, revealing double-dealing, the stealthy paws of several intelligence agencies, a mass of bureaucratic ineptitude, and some political chicanery.
Within weeks, bits of the Supergun began popping up all over Europe.
On April 23, Turkey announced it had stopped a Hungarian truck carrying a single ten-meter steel tube for Iraq, believed to be part of the gun. The same day, Greek officials seized another truck with steel parts and held the hapless British driver for several weeks as an accomplice. In May the Italians intercepted seventy-five tons of parts, while a further fifteen tons were confiscated at the Fucine works, near Rome. The latter were of a titanium steel alloy and destined to be part of the breech of the gun, as were more bits and pieces yielded by a warehouse at Brescia, in northern Italy.
The Germans came in, with discoveries at Frankfurt and Bremerhaven, also identified as parts of the by now world-famous Supergun.
In fact, Gerry Bull had placed the orders for his brainchild skillfully and well. The tubes forming the barrels were indeed made in England by two firms, Walter Somers of Birmingham and Sheffield Forgemasters. But the eight intercepted in April 1990 were the last of fifty-two sections, enough to make two complete barrels 156 meters long and with an unbelievable one-meter caliber, capable of firing a projectile the size of a cylindrical telephone
