Джанет Моррис - The 40-Minute War

Ignoring Slick, Ashmead began to dress. When he’d secreted all his equipment he pulled on a mislah —a long brown coat trimmed with gold thread—and headed for the door.

“Shit, Rafic, where do you think you’re going? What if—”

The phone’s ring interrupted Slick and he dived for it as if it were a live grenade that had just landed in front of him.

Slick said: “ Salaam .” Then: “Black Widow.” Then: “Say again?” Then: “We copy that, Uncle.” Then he hung up.

Ashmead looked at him questioningly, his hand suddenly slippery on the doorknob: “So?” Slick’s use of the recognition code “Black Widow” meant that it was the call they’d been waiting for—a go or no-go relayed from Ashmead’s staff headquarters.

Slick looked up at him gloomily: “It’s a no-go. Let’s pack up and get out of here.”

Ashmead’s stomach sank: “Then they’ve found another way that sits better with the Saudis—probably a shoot-down in international waters. Sure.”

Slick said nothing and Ashmead came back and began to strip, setting a stoic example but a silent one. If he opened his mouth again, all the resentment he felt for the Stateside desk jockeys who’d worked up a flow chart and subjected their data to analysis and then backed off would come pouring out. And Slick didn’t need to hear it.

They worked without a word, like automatons: Slick had very little time to pack up Elint’s electronics and the gas canisters whose lines Slick had fed with tubing through carefully drilled holes in the floor which exited above the ornate light fixtures in the ceilings of the rooms below.

They’d just finished wrestling the canisters into the huge steamer trunk they’d used to bring them upstairs when, once more, the phone rang.

“That’s Elint,” Slick predicted. “You tell him, Rafic. I haven’t got the stomach for it.”

Ashmead nodded and went slowly to the phone, picking it up on its fourth ring: “Scrub,” he said simply in English, not waiting for the party on the other end of the line to identify himself.

“What?” said a guarded female voice: “This is Black Web to Widow. Say again?”

Ashmead snapped: “What the fuck now?”

“We’ve got a priority mail package for you, Widow; just came in and it contradicts the last letter you got. I say again: your uncle has had a change of heart. You’re go.”

“Affirmative and understood, sweetheart. See you tomorrow.”

“That would be nice,” said the female voice, wistful now. “Tell your nephew good luck and I’ll be waiting for him.”

“Will do.”

Slick was watching him, narrow-eyed, hands on hips, by the time Ashmead cradled the phone gently. “Not Zaki?”

“Control. We got a priority override—Beck, I’ll bet a month’s expense-account vouchers. Well, don’t just stand there. Let’s put all this stuff back together again. Oh, yeah, that little girl of yours said to wish you good luck.”

Surveying the jumble of equipment in the trunk and the cords he’d thrown in at random, Slick said: “Yeah? That’s nice. We’re going to need it.”

To most Foreign Service officers, even in the Mediterranean, word came earlier than it did to Marc Beck, who was babysitting a convention of genetic engineers with astronomical security clearances at a private estate on the Red Sea when an aide slipped him a note.

The State Department being what it was, the note was cryptic—SM/NSB B-1; RSVP—but the Israeli hand holding it out to him was as white as the paper and shaking like a leaf: one look at the blanched face of the Saiyeret commando was all Beck needed to confirm the urgency of the coded message.

The prefix SM was familiar, even routine: Shariah Mosque—Riyadh; following it, instead of an operation’s cryptonym, was the acronym for Nuclear Surface Blast; after that came the standard letter-number intelligence appraisal, B-1, which told Beck that the information was from a usually reliable source and confirmed by other sources; the RSVP appended was somebody’s cynical joke.

Given the above, he left the genetic engineers to their Israeli hosts and RSVP’d toward Jerusalem at a hundred eighty klicks per hour, eschewing a driver and pushing his Corps Diplomatique Plymouth well beyond the laws of man and physics in exactly the way every new diplomat was warned against when first posted overseas.

He would never remember the cars he ran off the road into the soft sand, and later into one another; he only remembered the sky, which he watched through his double-gradient aviator’s glasses for some sign of thermal shock wave, a flash of light, a mushroom cloud, a doomsday darkening in the southeast over the Gulf or northeast over Iran—and the radio, which was stubbornly refusing to confirm or deny what the little piece of State Department letterhead in his pocket said.

Beck wasn’t naive, but he couldn’t believe that the bombing of Saudi Arabia’s capital wasn’t newsworthy. Damn it to hell, Ashmead had ignored the pullback order and, though his report had been right, his tactics hadn’t: a Gulf war which could render radioactive every barrel of oil on which the West depended was likely to be the result.

So the Islamic Jihad had actually done it! Nobody believed they could—or would… nobody but a handful of Ashmead’s field-weary counterterrorists, who couldn’t write a grammatical report and didn’t seem to understand that a nuclear blast in Riyadh was simply unacceptable and, under the conditions the counterterrorists had detailed in their situation report, probably unavoidable as soon as any interdiction plan was undertaken. His mind reeling with possible implications, Beck tromped the gas pedal. He hoped to hell that by the time he reached Jerusalem Ashmead and his team of cowboy operatives had been pulled in by the ears and were waiting for him. He was going to personally kick Ashmead’s butt around the block.

Beck, in fifteen years of overseas postings, had never been party to an error of this magnitude. He’d signed off on a negative analysis of Ashmead’s intelligence, along with everyone else whose opinion he respected, with Beck’s own confidential notation appended that, despite Ashmead’s record and predilections, Ashmead would obey a simple pullback order if it was given—a tragic misjudgment of the covert actor’s character which had probably just destroyed years of productive relations between the US and the House of Saud. Beck had visions of himself standing rigidly while Aramco and Bechtel VPs helped his superiors decide just where Beck was going to be posted next—Greenland, if he was lucky; the Manchurian border, if he wasn’t.

Because Beck had loyally stood up for Ashmead when others had questioned the wisdom of assuming that the area’s Covert Action Staff Chief would simply follow orders, it wasn’t going to look nearly as bad in Beck’s superiors’ files as it was in his. He wheeled the competent Plymouth past an Israeli convoy on the move, their desert camouflage reminding him, if he needed the reminder, that he was posted in a war zone.

The worst that could happen, he decided, was that he’d be sent Stateside—headquarters wouldn’t sack the lot of them, even if the entire House of Saud was a puff of radioactive dust wafting over the Empty Quarter by now.

And that wouldn’t be all bad, as far as Beck was concerned—he was ready for a rest. He’d been here seventeen months as State’s liaison without portfolio, trying to reduce friction among the various intelligence services crawling over Israel like ants on a picnic table.

And he’d been doing pretty well—Ashmead had trusted Beck, and Ashmead didn’t trust anybody; Mossad and Shin Bet honchos invited Beck to weapons tests and gave him Saiyeret commandos, no questions asked, when he needed security boys, as he had for this conference—pretty well, until today.