remaining bodyguard. The coded reply he awaited, a jumble of numbers, arrived in the embassy communications room within two hours. After it had been de-ciphered it was brought to him.
XXCLL4782.19
FOREIGN MINISTRY JERUSALEM
OO 182.08 PERSONAL FOREIGN MINISTER TO AMBASSADOR UK ITEM HIS EYES ONLY ITEM
AFTER URGENT CONSIDERATION SOKAREV'S MOVEMENT EYE INFORMING AMBASSADOR USA TO
ANNOUNCE CANCELLATION OF ABOVE'S TRAVEL AND SPEAKING ARRANGEMENTS IN NY AND
OTHERS ITEM SOKAREV SHOULD RETURN ISRAEL FIRST AVALIABLE NON-STOP ELAL FLIGHT
ITEM WE DEMAND FULLEST SECURITY DURING REMAINING HOURS SOKAREV'S PRESENCE
UK PARTICULAR LONDON HEATROW DEPARTURE ITEM YOU WILL ISSUE STRONGEST
PROTEST TO UK GOVERNMENT AT LEVEL NOT BELOW FOREIGN MINISTER PREFERABLY
PRIME MINISTER AT LAX UK SECURITY STRESSING FULL INFORMATION AND WARNING
PROVIDED BY OUR SECURITY SERVICE PRIOR SOKAREV ARRIVAL ITEM WE REQUIRE
PUBLIC EXPRESSION REGRET ITEM COMMUNICATION COMPLETE
XXDY4782.19
Alone in the flat in Beersheba the scientist's wife heard over the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation's final radio news bulletin of the attack on her husband. The information came without warning, as the news media transmitted the story faster than those Government authorities responsible for her husband's welfare could react.
In desperation she tried to telephone first her son; on operational stand-by and not available to take messages.
Next her daughters; both out of their student hostels and not expected back till later. The Director at Dimona, an old friend; away at a conference in Tiberias. The seemingly endless lingering of the disappointments as she waited four times for a familiar voice to come on the line, and on each occasion had her hopes dashed, took a heavy toll. She sat in David Sokarev's chair, beside the fire that would not be lit till the winter came and the cold over the desert and waited for the early morning light still five hours away.
That she knew her man was safe was of some small help.
What caused her to sob soundlessly into the half-darkness of the centre of the room was the knowledge of the deep fear and terror he would have suffered. So inoffensive, so mild, without enemies, without a voice that was ever raised in anger. Buried away in a cramped office, insulated against the hatred and hostility that lay rampant beyond the wire fences of Dimona. But would his work, and the implications of his study, provide him with an insight into this obscenity? She wondered. The preparation of the bomb itself, awful, grotesque, multi-destructive, would that have prepared him to confront the viciousness of the last hours? It was not his way to see the bomb as a finished and completed article of war. Just figures and notes on paper. Drawings that were meaningless to others. Long hours and days and months of work. Calculations and equations.
He would not have understood. He had been too long absent from the world of men who now fought round him to take and protect his life. He would be alone, defenceless.
That was why she wept for him.
The Special Air Service squad were brought to Chisholm Road in two Black Maria police vans from an improvised helicopter landing pad on the football pitches beside the main road that ran out of Richmond to the south. They wore full-length black dungarees, were not encumbered with webbing and equipment and none boasted badges of rank on their upper arms or shoulders. They jumped casually and with ease from the open doors at the back of the vans, and then the heavy canvas bags were handed down.
Jimmy stood in the shadows and watched them. Not youngsters, but most of them still half his age, hair cut close, clean shaven, disinterested faces visible only when the lights rotating on the roofs of the fire engines illuminated the path across which they walked. The killing squad. Different to Jimmy, not self-taught as he had been.
Trained and practised, funded by Government that their expertise should be developed. Selected with care and toughened and primed. Taught not to act independently, but in the pack, deadly and irreversible when the leash was slipped. If they felt excitement they did not show it, just trooped after the one who was their leader across the road to where the Home Office man waited. Some squatted low over sheets of paper held flat on the pavement, others stood in a circle peering into the area lit by torches.
William Dawson was a thorough man. He took them through the diagram of the outside of the house, all windows and doors marked in red, first the ground floor, then the upper storey. The squad said nothing, two taking notes, the others watching and silent. Then came the plans of the interior of the end-of-terrace home. Drawn to scale.
Red marking the doorways again, and blue crosses on those that the neighbours had reported to be fitted with locks and bolts. Fingers ran along the routes of the hallway, the stairs and the landing. Occasionally those at the back would crane their necks up the street to relate the floodlit frontage with the paperwork. Jimmy stood half a dozen paces back from the huddle; Jones was far behind him at the steps of the police control vehicle.
Dawson was talking, fast and coherent, sketching the plan he had described to the Prime Minister. Diversions, and time factors, and entry points, and opposition capability, and of the laser. There were precedents, and case histories and suggestions. The attention that the squad gave the Civil Servant was the accolade that he had done his work, was as expert in the planning as they would be in the execution.
When the group broke up it was to appointed tasks.
Four to unload the firepower they had brought with them, to lay the weapons out and to load them. Four more to begin a scrounging expedition among the fire brigades, for ropes and axes and the fifteen-foot ladders that would carry them to the first-floor windows. The officer and his sergeant detached themselves, and in the company of a ranking police officer made their way past the front doors of the houses, traversing the front gardens, working closer to the house that they would storm. When they had seen the front they moved, silent and catlike, through another house and across its back garden till they came without warning on the police who watched the rear of Number 25. From the outside there was little to tell them of the situation beyond the brick walls. All curtains drawn, windows darkened.
'They had the light on a bit ago. In the front, upstairs, the small room where the girl sleeps. It was off within a minute. The men across the road from the front think the curtain there moved once, but it's bloody difficult to be sure. It was when we first started the noise business that the Home Office chap wanted. The second time we did it nothing happened, not that we saw. There's been three more times we've used the noise since then, and nothing.
No movement that we've seen.'
The Chief Inspector was depressed. That this was not police work he acknowledged, was grateful he was not asking among his men for volunteers for an attack party, but the very competence and hardness of the new arrivals had shaken and concerned him.
'What chance have you got of getting those people out alive?' That was the nub of the problem as he saw it, and he raised the question as they slipped back toward the concentration of vehicles and men.
'Can't say,' replied the officer quietly, as if their voices would carry. 'Depends where the family are, whether they're together. What state the wounded fellow is in.
How much speed we can muster. If we're fast enough there's a good chance. The theory is that it's difficult for a man to turn his gun on his hostages as we're coming through the door. He has no protection. He goes with them. There's not many relish that — that's what the handbook says, at any rate. But it's all theory. There's nothing cut and dried.'
Before they reached the fire engine closest to the house, and where men in uniform had gathered, and where there would be ears to listen to their conversation, the officer said, 'Don't misunderstand me, but isn't there some question about priorities? The hostages aren't at the top of the list as I see it. If they were we'd be talking, negotiating.
Spinning it out. I have the priority as the two blokes. If we get the family out that's a bonus. Hitting those two buggers in there is what we're here for.'
Jimmy's eyes had seldom left the house. Its very ordinariness fascinated him. Uninteresting, unremarkable, undistinguished. Forty-nine others like it in the road. An inhabited box. Lived in by people who were stereotype-
