Colin Forbes - Year of the Golden Ape

^ Winter heard about the incident within five minutes of its happening. Wrigley met him in the alleyway while he was returning to his galley, escorted by an armed guard, and had no hesitation in telling him about the near-rape. Winter reacted instantly. He summoned LeCat to his cabin.

^ Winter took three strides across the cabin and LeCat, seeing his expression, grabbed for the pistol in his shoulder holster. Winter's hand closed on the wrist, digging into the nerve centre. LeCat's hand, still holding the pistol butt he had no time to extract, felt paralysed. His limp fingers released the butt as Winter twisted the hand violently and spun the Frenchman round by the shoulder hinge until he was half-crouched with his back to the Englishman. The pain in his shoulder was acute and he dared not move for fear of breaking his arm.

^ Winter trundled the bent man forward until he was close to the edge of the bunk. Releasing his grip a little, he allowed LeCat to lift his head a few inches, then he used his other hand to press the Frenchman's head down over the bunk with his throat rested on the hard wooden edge. The hard edge of the bunk rasped his victim's Adam's apple. 'One sharp movement and your neck is broken, LeCat,' Winter said softly. 'You know that, don't you?'

^ LeCat was terrified. He knew exactly what could happen, what he had done to a man in a similar position in Algeria once. A movement, one horrendous jerk, and his neck would snap. He was almost sick with terror.

^ 'If you even go near that woman again for the rest of the trip, I'll kill you.' Winter's tone was detached, almost conversational.

^ Grasping a handful of hair, he lifted LeCat's head clear of the bunk, swung his body round and shoved him forward. Off-balance, the Frenchman cannoned hard against a bulkhead and fell on the floor. Getting up slowly, dazed by the impact, LeCat left the cabin. It hadn't made him love Winter any the more, but he felt the cause of his humiliation was the American girl. Added to his crude desire for her was a bitter hatred.

^ Less than an hour before night fell on the Pacific, the helicopter was flown away from the ^ Challenger ^ by the only terrorist – other than Winter – who could fly the machine. Guided by continuous radio signals from the ^ Pecheur, ^ he reached the trawler which was sailing a hundred miles south of the ^ Challenger. ^ The moment the plane landed its insignia were covered with canvas flaps specially prepared for the purpose. It didn't matter if a ship or a plane saw the machine sitting on the deck of the trawler, but it would have seemed very strange had it been spotted aboard the 50,000-ton tanker.

^ ^ Andre Dupont. The escape apparatus – the Zodiac inflatable boat, the outboard motor, and the wet-suits – were all stored away in the carpenter's store under the forecastle. And during this work, carried out many hundreds of feet away from the distant island bridge, there was also unloaded a steel case weighing almost two hundred pounds which was transported with some difficulty and carried down the ladder into the cramped compartment.

^ When Sheikh Carnal Tafak moved to his secret headquarters on the first floor of a building on the outskirts of Baalbek in the Lebanon, it was partly considerations of policy which decided the Saudi Arabian oil minister to go to ground – he wanted to isolate himself until the San Francisco operation had been completed. A man who cannot be found cannot answer any questions, and there were certain statesmen in the Middle East who were already very worried by Tafak's extremist views.

^ But that was only part of the reason. The other part was more simple and human – Tafak was frightened that he might be assassinated. There had been too many rumours that Israeli gunmen were on the move; there had even been a whisper that British and American secret service men were cooperating with the Israeli intelligence service. In Baalbek, a place he had never visited before, he felt safe.

^ The first message he received at his new headquarters was from Winter. Within thirty minutes of seizing the ^ Challenger ^ a brief radio signal was transmitted anonymously to the United Arab Republic consulate in San Francisco. ^ Avocado consignment has been delivered. ^ Inside a locked room in the consulate Talaal Ismail reached for the phone and put in a call to a Paris number. From here the message was transmitted to Athens and on to Beirut. The man Ahmed Riad had placed in a flat in Beirut made one bad slip when he phoned Tafak. He referred to him as 'Excellency' while he was reporting the message confirming the tanker's seizure. 'No titles,' Tafak snapped and slammed down the phone as soon as he had heard the message. Not that he really believed the phone would be tapped.

^ The girl who worked as switchboard operator in the block of flats on Lafayette Street in Beirut waited until both receivers had been replaced before she turned down the switch. Then she started attending to the incoming calls she had kept waiting.

^ She was nervous. It was the first time she had listened in to calls for money. To pass the time of day, to listen to a woman making a furtive and erotic call to her lover while her husband was out; that was another thing. Most switchboard operators did that, or so Lucille Fahmy consoled herself. But this, she suspected, could be dangerous. And who was 'Excellency'?

^ 'Good evening, Lucille…' He greeted her like an old friend, leaning close to make himself heard above the racket of the juke box which was playing the latest Tom Jones record. At six in the evening the place was filling up with Lebanese teenagers. Despite the chill in the air outside it was hot and stuffy in the Cafe Leon. Plenty of oil for 'heating here; oil coming out of their ears. The mournful-faced man ordered coffee and cakes.

^ He patted his breast pocket. 'I have the fifty dollars with me. Was it a local call?'

^ She hesitated, then opened her bag and took out a folded banknote with the number written inside which she handed to him. Anyone watching would have assumed he was short of cash, that his girl friend was paying tonight. He slipped the folded note into his wallet, next to another note he had folded earlier. He would pay with that note – just in case someone was watching him.

^

^ Again it showed nervousness – she was talking for the sake of talking. Of course he could trace any number in the Lebanon, and find the address – because it was the address which interested him. She waited until the waiter had brought the coffee and cakes and then leaned towards him. 'It was about some avocados – he just said the avocado consignment has been delivered. Oh, and he called the man at the other end Excellency…'

^ 'He might…' The man who had told her his name was Albert appeared to know all about it – or this was the impression he deliberately gave her – and now he understood her nervousness. Like so many people in the Middle East she was frightened of the powerful. He went on sipping his coffee, hiding his shock, his hope. It looked as though they had found Tafak.

^ One Fleet Street newspaper in London caught a hint of a whisper of a rumour – and had a 'D' notice served on it – an edict it could not ignore, so the story went unpublished. As it happened, the story was true.

^ The British Prime Minister had driven secretly to Lyneham air base in Wiltshire, one of Britain's remoter airfields in the Salisbury Plain area. His timing was good: as his car sped towards the airfield buildings a Trident dropped out of the grey overcast and cruised along a nearby runway.

^ When the machine had stopped, the Prime Minister was driven close up to the aircraft, so close that it pulled up at the foot of the mobile staircase which had been hastily rushed into position. He waited inside the car as a man appeared at the top of the mobile staircase, ran briskly down the steps and climbed inside the rear of the waiting car.