She sat on the corrugated-steel deck beside the armament control panel in the stripped cargo bay, rocking with the sharp lifts and descents of the racing helicopter, puffing a Gauloise.
The departure of the Rabkrin team from Beirut three nights ago had taken the SDECE by surprise; Elena had been monitoring the surveillance by radio from a motor yacht off the north Beirut shore, for since the night of January 12 she had not dared set foot in the city.
On the evening of the seventh she had encoded and tapped out a message to SDECE headquarters in the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, saying that Philby’s defection offer appeared to be genuine, accompanied as it was by all the authentic signs of confusion and dislocated pride that one looked for in a ripely breaking defector; but then she had not been able to speak to Philby again until five days later, when he went into the Khayats Bookshop on Avenue Bliss, momentarily alone. He had been evasive then, too hearty in his greeting, and all the caution-warnings in her head had sounded when he proposed meeting her that night at the Pigeon Grotto cliffs.
She had kept the assignation, but she brought along a full covering team of SDECE street-play experts-known as gamins des rues-and she stood on the inland side of the street, on the entry steps of Yazbeck’s all-night pharmacy. And even against the backdrop of a public building, she had been shot at.
She had made sure to maintain a six-foot distance from every pedestrian, and, on the frail theory that a sniper required two full seconds to bring the crosshairs of a telescopic sight to bear on a target, she had been moving constantly, with many abrupt about-faces. In such a crowded, public place, with the whole Rabkrin team still in town, any kind of full-automatic fire seemed ruled out. Her legs were twitching with the urge to tap out one of the old clochard nothing-right-here rhythms, but she was afraid that such a move would hide her from Philby’s notice, if he did show up.
She had been wearing body-armor under her coat, and her hat weighed ten pounds with the steel-and-resin-and-ceramic laminate of its low-hanging crown-but this was as perilous a game as tightrope-walking, and she made herself do it mainly in atonement for having prematurely tried to shoot Philby eleven nights earlier, on the evening of New Year’s Day. Surely this ordeal, putting herself in the way of a bullet, was adequate penance!
A rifle bullet would have penetrated any of her protections-but by standing on the inland side of the street she had apparently disrupted any plans for placement of a rifle, and so it was just three fast 9-millimeter handgun rounds that hammered her hat and punched her twice in the spine. The impacts threw her forward onto her hands and knees on the sidewalk, but the gamins des rues were on her in an instant, and dragged her limp body into the pharmacy. The body armor had kept the bullets from reaching her, but the shot to the head had stunned her.
She had been bundled into the backup vehicle, a flower-decked hearse, which accelerated away to a boat dock by the Place Côte d’Azur south of the city. Philby’s status was switched from exfiltration-target to a proposed assassination-target; but orders for an assassination would have to come from the Quai d’Orsay, and anyway Elena had been the only assassination-qualified SDECE agent in Beirut, and she was ordered to control the stalled operation from a boat in the north-shore marina.
Philby had moved furtively after that, and the Rabkrin team had set up a protection cordon around his apartment building on the Rue Kantari, and the apartment’s curtains were always drawn.
Andrew Hale had been kept even more secluded by the Rabkrin, after his arrest for public drunkenness on the morning of the eighth.
It appeared that Hale really had defected to the Rabkrin side; Claude Cassagnac had been killed at Hale’s house in England three and a half weeks ago, and the SIS stations really did have Hale on their urgently-detain lists all over the Middle East. The cover identity the Rabkrin had given him must have been very solid, to get him through a sûreté interrogation. Oddly, the SDECE had not been able to get a transcript of the interrogation from the police.
According to protocol, she would also need authorization from the Quai d’Orsay to kill Hale-if she proposed doing it in Beirut. But the counter-Ararat operation had already been approved, and it included a provision that all members of the Rabkrin team might be killed, if they made it onto the slopes of Mount Ararat.
Elena had requested the Alouette III, with specific modifications, and she told the SDECE to get the French diplomatic corps to work on calling in favors from the Iranian Pahlavi government-the helicopter needed to be trucked to some remote spot in the northwest corner of Iran, near the eastern Turkish border.
The Iranian government had been hard to convince-a national election was scheduled for the twenty-sixth, and the progressive White Revolution party didn’t want to provide any excuses for anti-Western sentiments-and so the helicopter, and the peculiar warheads in its four-nozzle 70-millimeter rockets, had not been ready and in place until the twenty-second; and on the very next night the Rabkrin team had surreptitiously left Beirut.
From the rain-swept deck of the yacht, Elena had actually seen one member evacuated.
Beirut had been a neon blur through the sweeping veils of rain on that night, and from the crackling speaker of her radio in the main cabin she listened to her surveillance agents out there in the city complaining about stalled cars and flooded intersections. They had lost Philby, but hoped to regain contact at a dinner he was going to that night at the house of the First Secretary of the British Embassy. Immediately after that transmission she had heard a motorboat laboring through the storm surf outside, and she had snatched up her binoculars, unlocked the cabin door and gone swaying out onto the deck.
She had barely been able to see the boat through the rain. It had been a flat-bottom inflatable Bombard rescue-craft with an outboard motor at the stern, and it was showing no lights. As she watched, the ponderous rubber boat rocked over the low waves and slid up the beach below the Normandy Hotel.
The Normandy was where the Rabkrin team had been staying.
Dimly in the reflected glow from the hotel windows she had seen two figures waiting on the beach; one of them got into the boat, and then it was pushed away, back into the whirling surf.
She had gone back inside and picked up the radio microphone. “I think your target won’t show up at the dinner,” she told the surveillance team. “I think he’s bolted. I think they all have.”
She had poured herself a glass of brandy then, for the Rabkrin team appeared to be on its way, after all, to Mount Ararat. The SDECE force had failed to stop the Soviet operation in Beirut, and she had not turned Philby-but the Alouette III was at last in place in Khvoy, and within a couple of days Philby and Hale would both be on the mountain.
She wondered if she had meant things to work out this way all along.
The Rabkrin party would climb to Noah’s Ark-and then all of the witnesses of her shames would be together in one place: the djinn with whom she had participated in the deaths of her men in the Ahora Gorge in 1948, Kim Philby who had heard her secrets and been permitted into her bed, and Andrew Hale, whom she had loved.
The 70-millimeter rockets in the seven-tube rocket launchers were cyclotol explosive packed in shells lathed from Shihab meteoric steel. A barrage of them should take care of everyone.
In her earphones now she heard the helicopter pilot say, “Une dizaine minutes.” Ten minutes or so to target. Out the port windows she could see through the ground mists the white south shoulder of Ararat, still twenty miles away. She threw her cigarette onto the helicopter deck and ground it out under the toe of her boot; then she turned to the armament control panel and clicked up the switch that armed the rocket launchers. The green STANDBY light went out, and the red ARMED light was now glowing, right next to the red light that had all along been indicating that the gun-firing solenoids of the.50-caliber machine guns were activated.