Jack Higgins: Eye of the Storm

At that moment, Captain Ali Rashid was by the Seine at the end of a small pier jutting out into the river. The rain was falling very heavily, still plenty of sleet in it. The floodlights were on at Notre Dame and the effect was of something seen partially through a net curtain. He watched Dillon turn along the narrow pier to the building on stilts at the far end, waited until he went in and followed him.

The place was quite old and built of wood, barges and boats of various kinds moored all around. The sign over the door said Le Chat Noir . He peered through the window cautiously. There was a bar and several tables just like the other place. The only difference was that people were eating. There was even a man sitting on a stool against the wall playing an accordion. All very Parisian. Dillon was standing at the bar speaking to a young woman.

Rashid moved back, walked to the end of the pier, paused by the rail in the shelter of a small terrace and dialled the number of Aroun’s house in the Avenue Victor Hugo on his portable phone.

There was a slight click as the Walther was cocked and Dillon rammed the muzzle rather painfully into his right ear. ‘Now then, son, a few answers,’ he demanded. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Rashid,’ the young man said. ‘Ali Rashid.’

‘What are you then? PLO?’

‘No, Mr Dillon. I’m a captain in the Iraqi Army, assigned to protect Mr Aroun.’

‘And Makeev and the KGB?’

‘Let’s just say he’s on our side.’

‘The way things are going in the Gulf you need somebody on your side, my old son.’ There was the faint sound of a voice from the portable phone. ‘Go on, answer him.’

Makeev said, ‘Rashid, where is he?’

‘Right here, outside a café on the river near Notre Dame,’ Rashid told him. ‘With the muzzle of his Walther well into my ear.’

‘Put him on,’ Makeev ordered.

Rashid handed the phone to Dillon who said, ‘Now then, you old sod.’

‘A million, Sean. Pounds if you prefer that currency.’

‘And what would I have to be doing for all that money?’

‘The job of a lifetime. Let Rashid bring you round here and we’ll discuss it.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Dillon said. ‘I think what I’d really like is for you to get your arse into gear and come and pick us up yourself.’

‘Of course,’ Makeev said. ‘Where are you?’

‘The Left Bank opposite Notre Dame. A little pub on a pier called Le Chat Noir. We’ll be waiting.’

He slipped the Walther into his pocket and handed the phone to Rashid who said, ‘He’s coming then?’

‘Of course he is.’ Dillon smiled. ‘Now let’s you and me go inside and have ourselves a drink in comfort.’

In the sitting room on the first floor of the house in the Avenue Victor Hugo overlooking the Bois de Boulogne, Josef Makeev put down the phone and moved to the couch where his overcoat was.

‘Was that Rashid?’ Aroun demanded.

‘Yes. He’s with Dillon now at a place on the river. I’m going to get them.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

Makeev pulled on his coat. ‘No need, Michael. You hold the fort. We won’t be long.’

He went out. Aroun took a cigarette from a silver box and lit it, then he turned on the television. He was halfway into the news. There was direct coverage from Baghdad, Tornado fighter bombers of the British Royal Air Force attacking at low level. It made him bitterly angry. He switched off, poured himself a brandy and went and sat by the window.

Michael Aroun was forty years of age and a remarkable man by any standards. Born in Baghdad of a French mother and an Iraqi father who was an army officer, he’d had a maternal grandmother who was American. Through her, his mother had inherited ten million dollars and a number of oil leases in Texas.

She had died the year Aroun had graduated from Harvard Law School leaving everything to her son because his father, retired as a general from the Iraqi Army, was happy to spend his later years at the old family house in Baghdad with his books.

Like most great businessmen, Aroun had no academic training in the field. He knew nothing of financial planning or business administration. His favourite saying, one much quoted, was: When I need a new accountant, I buy a new accountant.

His friendship with Saddam Hussein had been a natural development from the fact that the Iraqi President had been greatly supported in his early days in politics by Aroun’s father, who was also an important member of the Baath Party. It had placed Aroun in a privileged position as regards the development of his country’s oilfields, brought him riches beyond calculation.

After the first billion you stopped counting, another favourite saying. And now he was faced with disaster. Not only the promised riches of the Kuwait oilfields snatched from him, but that portion of his wealth which stemmed from Iraq dried up, finished as a result of the Coalition’s massive airstrikes which had devastated his country since 17 January.

He was no fool. He knew that the game was over; should probably have never started, and that Saddam Hussein’s dream was already finished. As a businessman he played the percentages and that didn’t offer Iraq too much of a chance in the ground war that must eventually come.

He was far from ruined in personal terms. He had oil interests still in the USA and the fact that he was a French as well as an Iraqi citizen gave Washington a problem. Then there was his shipping empire and vast quantities of real estate in various capital cities around the world. But that wasn’t the point. He was angry when he switched on the television and saw what was happening in Baghdad each night for, surprising in one so self-centred, he was a patriot. There was also the fact, infinitely more important, that his father had been killed in a bombing raid on the third night of the air war.

And there was a great secret in his life, for in August, shortly after the invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi forces, Aroun had been sent for by Saddam Hussein himself. Sitting here by the French window, a glass of brandy in one hand, rain slanting across the terrace, he gazed out across the Bois de Boulogne in the evening light and remembered that meeting.

There was an air-raid practice in progress as he was driven in an army Land Rover through the streets of Baghdad, darkness everywhere. The driver was a young intelligence captain named Rashid who he had met before, one of the new breed, trained by the British at Sandhurst. Aroun gave him an English cigarette and took one himself.

‘What do you think, will they make some sort of move?’

‘The Americans and Brits?’ Rashid was being careful. ‘Who knows? They’re certainly reacting. President Bush seems to be taking a hard line.’

‘No, you’re mistaken,’ Aroun said. ‘I’ve met the man face to face twice now at White House functions. He’s what our American friends call a nice guy. There’s no steel there at all.’

Rashid shrugged. ‘I’m a simple man, Mr Aroun, a soldier, and perhaps I see things simply. Here is a man, a navy combat pilot at twenty, who saw a great deal of active service, who was shot down over the Sea of Japan and survived to be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. I would not underestimate such a man.’

Aroun frowned. ‘Come on, my friend, the Americans aren’t going to come halfway round the world with an army to protect one little Arab state.’

‘Isn’t that exactly what the British did in the Falklands War?’ Rashid reminded him. ‘They never expected such a reaction in Argentina. Of course they had Thatcher’s determination behind them, the Brits, I mean.’

‘Damned woman,’ Aroun said and leaned back as they went in through the gate of the presidential palace, feeling suddenly depressed.