This was no time for idle chatter. Still speaking in French, Mitchell told Abdul that there was a hit squad somewhere behind him, searching for Gamoudi, determined to assassinate him. He told him that the Americans had the Gamoudi family, and their money, safe. Gamoudi was to use this cell phone, which would connect him direct to the U.S. warship where Giselle and the boys were waiting to speak to him. The Americans would get Gamoudi out of Morocco, with the help of this cell phone. Jack Mitchell struggled through the French verbs, informing the old man about the phone’s GPS, which would beam its position to the ship’s communication room.
Abdul Gamoudi nodded gravely.
Jack Mitchell handed over the phone, and hoped to hell that old Abdul would remember everything.
In fact the French were some way behind. They did not even learn that the Saudi Boeing had left Beirut until after 10 P.M., when the local radio station announced the death of four French agents in the Crusaders’ Castle. The two men still on duty outside the Saudi embassy heard this, and tried to contact Paris.
That took longer than usual. From then it took four more hours to establish that the Saudi Boeing had left, probably carrying the passenger who had fled Riyadh.
The flight control office was closed and it was not until seven o’clock on Friday morning that the French Secret Service established that the Boeing had gone to Marrakesh, almost certainly with Col. Jacques Gamoudi, a native Moroccan, onboard.
Back in Paris, Gaston Savary was furious. He had always felt “out of the information loop” on this case, ever since the operation began, as if he were always trying to catch up. But now in his military/policeman’s mind, he knew a few things for certain: (1) His men had failed to eliminate Gamoudi in the car “accident” in Riyadh; (2) his men had not been in time to catch him at his residence in Riyadh; (3) having successfully tailed him to a little town north of Beirut, all four of his agents had got themselves killed; (4) his men had failed to detain Mrs. Gamoudi in the town square of Pau; (5) his Beirut team had somehow failed to track the Boeing without a delay of almost twelve hours; (6) the CIA wanted Colonel Gamoudi as badly as he did; and (7) Pierre St. Martin was going to have a blue fit when he found out that, right now, no one knew where the hell Gamoudi was.
He picked up his phone and went through on the direct line to Gen. Michel Jobert at the Special Forces headquarters in Taverny. It was the middle of the night, a fact that was not even noticed by either of the two men. General Jobert needed to move from his bedroom, and his sleeping wife, into his study next door. But that was the only delay — twenty seconds. At which point Gaston Savary recounted the entire sorry tale of the failure of the French Secret Service to put this matter to rest.
“And now, Michel,” he said, “we have this armed, highly dangerous military officer loose in the High Atlas Mountains, in an area in which he grew up, giving him every territorial advantage. And I’m supposed to catch him.”
Savary paused, and then said, “Michel, this is no longer a Secret Service operation. The President of France wants this man eliminated, and my organization is not equipped to stage a manhunt in the mountains. This has suddenly become military. People can get killed. We need helicopters, gunships, search radar, maybe even rockets, if we are to catch him.
“Michel, I am proposing to hand the entire operation over to the First Marine Parachute Infantry Regiment. Quite frankly, I hope you’ll agree, but anyway I am proposing to recommend to Monsieur St. Martin that the Special Forces take over from here. You do, after all, have two helicopter squadrons under your permanent command…”
“Gaston,” said the General, “I am in agreement with you. If they want Gamoudi killed, it will have to be Special Forces. I imagine that will also mean getting rid of the body?”
“Oh, certainly. They want Gamoudi to vanish off the face of the earth and to stay there.”
“Well, I have no doubt that can be arranged, Gaston,” said the General. “What’s our focus point for the operation?”
“Little village called Asni, thirty miles south of Marrakesh. It’s way up in the Atlas Mountains, and that’s where we think Gamoudi is hiding out, until we tire of trying to track him down.”
“You know, Gaston, it’s over a thousand miles from Marseille. We’ll make the journey overland, across Spain, with a refuel before we cross to North Africa. We have three of those long AS532 Cougar Mark Ones ready to deploy instantly, they hold twenty-five commandos each, and they’re well armed — machine guns, canons and rockets. Plus tons of surveillance. I can have them in Marrakesh tomorrow morning. Do I speak to St. Martin, or do you?”
“I will, now. I’ll tell him you’re on the case. And I’ll send detailed briefing papers via e-mail in ten.”
“Okay, Gaston. Let’s go and silence this troublesome little bastard once and for all.”
Abdul Gamoudi had made an excellent delivery. His closest friend owned the main ski shop in the area. He borrowed equipment and met his son at the foot of a high escarpment, 500 feet below the ice line. Gamoudi’s father arrived cross-country in a pickup truck full of equipment — boots, socks, climbing trousers, sweaters, weatherproof jackets, and, as requested by Gamoudi, nothing in bright modern colors, all of it in drab, almost camouflage coloring. There were sleeping bags, gloves, rucksack bergans, ice axes, crampons, hammers, nylon climbing ropes, and a small primus stove to heat food and water.
Abdul had followed Jacques’s instructions to bring everything three people would require to stay alive up there for a week. He had also brought the “magic” cell phone.
Abandoning the hired Ford, Rashood, Shakira, and Gamoudi climbed aboard the pickup. Rashood, sitting on the sleeping bags in the back, handed over 60,000 dirhams to Abdul, who now drove them even higher into the mountains to a point east of the ski-center village of Imlit.
This was their last stop-off. They unloaded the truck and gladly put on warmer clothes, and distributed the climbing equipment, while Abdul drove into Imlit to collect food and water. When he returned, they dumped their old clothes and bags into the pickup and made their farewells.
Abdul smiled and shook hands with Rashood and Shakira, and he hugged Jacques. There were tears streaming down his tough, weather-beaten face as he stood alone on the mountain and watched them trudge off to the northeast, uncertain whether he would ever see his only son again.
Gamoudi had selected a familiar but lonely route that would swiftly bring them into a rugged stretch of hillside with deep escarpments and plenty of cover. After two miles they stopped. Gamoudi sat on a low rock and fired up the cell phone.
He pressed the power switch and then hit the single button that would relay him and his satellite position to the comms room in the U.S.S.
However, Gamoudi’s excitement hardly registered compared to the exhilaration onboard the
The words
Captain Pickard spoke carefully. “Colonel Gamoudi, my ship is about eighty miles off the coast of Morocco, in the port of Agadir. How far are you from the port?”
