Colin Forbes - Year of the Golden Ape

LeCat became even more savage in his battles with the terrorists; from then on he used his skill as an explosives expert to lace the hillsides with boobytraps. No farm building, no outhouse, not even an animal's drinking trough was safe to touch. His commanding officer was impressed with his subordinate's ferocity.

'LeCat, you seem determined to kill every Arab in north Africa…'

'Then, mon colonel, there will be no terrorists left,' LeCat replied.

When De Gaulle decided to give Algeria independence and the OAS, a secret organisation pledged to keep Algeria French, revolted, LeCat joined it. His maxim, 'You must become a terrorist', came true. He became one. Had there been two dozen men like him in Algeria, De Gaulle might have failed. LeCat turned half Algiers into a minefield, but only half… When the end came he fled to Egypt to survive.

Speaking fluent Arabic – as well as French and English – LeCat merged with his Egyptian background, changing his name and telling everyone how he had worked against the OAS. He earned a little money – and the friendship of certain Arabs, including a certain Ahmed Riad – by going to Tel Aviv and spying on the Israelis. He also earned a reputation for being a good man to send on a killing party.

For ten years LeCat drifted, living in the Middle East, in Quebec, in America, engaged in various criminal activities, never staying anywhere so long that he was caught. In 1972 he returned to the Mediterranean where he joined the Englishman, Winter, in smuggling operations. For two years he had a profitable existence, then he was arrested in Marseilles, tried for smuggling and serious assault against the police, sentenced to a long term of imprisonment in the Sante prison in Paris.

Released later under mysterious circumstances, he came out of prison to be met by an Algerian who provided him with an air ticket to Algiers, a sum of money, and the address of a cafe where he met Ahmed Riad.

Riad explained the nature of the vast operation to create an incident which would outrage the West. What Riad did not explain was the ultimate plan whereby Sheikh Gamal Tafak, exploiting the outcry from the West, would persuade every Arab oil producer to cut the oil flow a second time – and this time to zero. Then, with the West hamstrung, the way would be open for the final, annihilating attack on Israel.

It was in March, in what came to be known as the Year of the Golden Ape, that LeCat put into operation the first part of the plan to create the terrible incident which would appal and out-rage the West. He went about organising the production of a nuclear device.

On March 10, France, like so many other countries, was half-paralysed by the huge Arab oil cut when Jean-Philippe Antoine, a small, self-contained man of thirty-five, walked confidently along a street in Nantes in western France. Stopping, he glanced up and down the street, then pressed the bell on a dentist's front door. The door opened a few inches, a pair of eyes stared at him. The Frenchman's confidence cracked.

'For God's sake, let me in…'

The pair of eyes disappeared and the door opened wider, just wide enough for him to step inside. Standing in the hallway, Antoine blinked in the gloom. At ten o'clock on a March morning it was still only half-light inside the old house; the lamp had not been turned on as an energy-saving measure. The front door closed behind him, the key turned in the lock. Antoine's lips trembled as he gazed at the short, wide-shouldered man who had let him in.

'Surely we should hurry?' Antoine demanded. 'Which way do I go?'

'You are nervous?' LeCat lit a Gitane and for a few seconds Antoine caught sight of his face in the match-flame; a cruel face, hardened by grim experience few men have to endure in their lifetime, a moustache curved down almost to the comers of a wide mouth, the eyes half-closed against the match-flame, eyes which calmly studied Antoine who had not replied. 'Oui, you are nervous, my friend. Go down the hall and through the doorway. The man who is waiting there will take you to the car.'

'I've changed my mind…' The effort the words caused Antoine made them come out in a near-hysterical rush. 'I can't go on with this thing.'

'But you have to…' LeCat blew smoke through his nose. 'You see, they are dead already – in there…'

Gesturing towards a half-open door leading off the hall, LeCat gripped Antoine's arm. 'Give me everything in your pockets and then move!' He took the identity card Antoine extracted from his pocket, grabbed the wallet, replaced the card inside it. He took a key-ring, a notebook, a pen. 'Now, that ring on your finger…'

'I must have the wallet…' Antoine was removing the ring from his finger, protesting and obeying at the same time. 'My ring is gold.. . there is one thousand francs inside the wallet, some photos…'

LeCat took the ring. 'A gold ring may survive. The wallet may get blown a hundred metres away by the explosion. If that happened, if the wallet survived also, your identity would be confirmed. Which would be excellent, would it not?' The face came closer in the gloom as Antoine shivered from the chill in the hall. 'I told you, my friend, they are already dead. Go!'

LeCat waited until Antoine had disappeared, then he walked inside the room beyond the half-open door. It was a dentist's surgery and the chair was occupied by a patient wearing his overcoat, a small, lean man about the height and build of Jean-Philippe Antoine. LeCat went over to the chair, placed the ring carefully on the limp hand lying in the patient's lap. The head was slumped forward and a smear of blood showed at the back of the skull.

The dentist's nurse lay on the floor face downwards, her legs curled, her white coat rumpled. It was cold inside the surgery and the window which faced the back garden was rimed with frost. No oil had arrived for a fortnight and the tank in the back garden was empty. LeCat finished distributing Antoine's possessions among the dead patient's pockets he had earlier emptied, then took one last look around the bleak room.

The dentist, wearing a white jacket and dark trousers, was sprawled at the foot of the dental chair. Like his nurse and his patient, he was also dead. A quarter of an hour before Antoine had arrived this frozen tableau had been alive. The dentist had been attending to his new patient, quite unaware that this stranger who had made his appointment to arrive just before Antoine's own appointment was a miserable Parisian pickpocket.

LeCat had searched Montmartre to find the right man, someone who was approximately the height, build and age of Antoine, someone not too bright who could be persuaded to make a dental appointment in exchange for the payment of a small sum of money. He had gathered from LeCat that the dentist was playing mothers and fathers with his nurse, who happened to be LeCat's wife, so a witness was needed. Not for any sordid court case where the pickpocket's record would be exposed, LeCat had assured him, but simply to teach the adulterer a lesson.

Everything was now correct, LeCat decided. He glanced at the patient's record files where a drawer was half-pulled out of the filing-case, patted his breast pocket to feel the bulge of record cards inside his jacket. Everything correct. Walking back into the gloomy hall, he bent down and turned a switch on a large box. Three minutes to detonation. He checked his watch where the sweep hand moved clearly round on the illuminated dial. He went quickly along the hall, through the doorway at the end and out of the back door. Then he started running, keeping below the level of the garden wall, through the open gate at the bottom and along the frosted track beyond until he reached the car parked behind a copse of evergreens.

The engine of the Renault was running and Antoine was sitting in the back beside another shadowy figure. LeCat climbed in behind the wheel, closed the door quietly, checked his watch. Sixty seconds… He drove rapidly along the track, away from the house hidden by the evergreens. He was turning on to a main road when they heard the b-o-o-m. In the back seat Antoine gave a little cry of horror which LeCat ignored. He felt the Shockwave push the side of the car, which he also ignored.