“Exceptionally well,” Ramad boasted as he sat down.
“And al-Qati’s soldiers?”
“I must admit, Colonel, that Colonel al-Qati’s troops are well-conditioned and well-disciplined. They have adapted quickly.”
“That is good to hear,” Salmi said. “I had feared that al-Qati’s reputation was as much smoke as substance.”
“No, he lives up to it.”
The air force commander lit a cigarette and relished his inhalation.
Ramad waited patiently.
Salmi asked, “Do you suppose that the good Colonel is also prepared to engage in Test Strike?”
Test Strike was the live exercise that Ramad had designed three months and eleven days before.
“Probably not, once he hears about it.”
“He must be told by tomorrow morning,” Salmi said.
Ramad let his lips broaden into a smile.
“Test Strike has been approved?”
“It has.”
“That is wonderful,” Ramad said. “However, as I said, al-Qati will drag his feet. We have discussed before what we think his true mission to be, spying on our operations at Marada Base for Ghazi. He will want to talk to Ghazi before he makes a commitment. And Ghazi will balk.”
Salmi, whose pockmarked, narrow face rarely smiled, offered a yellow-toothed grin. “The concerns of Colonel Ghazi have been taken care of, Ibrahim.”
“How can that be?”
“The Leader, advisor Amjab, and I met with Ghazi this morning, and he has been given his orders. He agreed to cooperate completely.”
Rather than lose his command of ground forces, Ramad thought.
“And therefore,” Salmi continued, “al-Qati’s objections are curtailed even before he makes them.”
Ramad hoped that he would be in a position to see al-Qati’s face when the man learned that Colonel Ghazi could no longer protect him.
“Now,” Salmi said, “it is your plan, and you must make the final decision. Your name alone will appear on the recommendation.”
The documentation would be self-protective of higher authority. Ramad understood that.
“My decision was made, Colonel Salmi, when I prepared the proposal.”
Salmi nodded, “Captain Mufti, if you would?”
Mufti pushed a cart containing a television and a videocassette recorder into position next to Salmi’s desk. He turned both on.
The screen blossomed into a view of a cell. Concrete walls and a steel door could be seen. The camera angle was from high in one corner. A man in stained clothing sat on a small stool in the centre of the cement floor.
The camera looked down on him, but he was apparently unaware of it, or he no longer cared. He sat with his head hung down, his lanky black hair falling forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He was dejected.
“The subject?” Ramad asked.
“All of the subjects are condemned persons. It does not matter how they die.”
“And this test?”
“This one utilizes the psychological agent. PD-86, I believe,” Salmi said.
Of the five types of chemical agents — incapacitating, defoliant, psychological, nerve, and toxin — they had not concerned themselves with the short-acting incapacitating agents such as tear gas, nor with defoliants.
PD-86, Ramad knew, was based on lysergic acid, the LSD of the American hippies.
On the screen, the cell began to mist. It was unobtrusive at first, just a slight blurriness to the environment. The prisoner seemed unaware of it.
Nothing else happened.
The man sat there for about five minutes.
Then began to laugh.
A little laugh at first, a smirk and giggle. Without effort, he was coming out of his depression.
Then an uproarious laugh.
He threw his shoulders back and his head snapped upright. His eyes appeared vivid.
He shook his head violently.
Laughing.
His arms flailed about.
He scratched his chest, his armpits, his crotch.
Laughing.
Insanely laughing.
The screen went blank.
“That went on for nearly forty minutes,” Salmi explained. “PD-86 completely disoriented him. On a larger scale, I think we could expect that a hostile force would act similarly, unable to mount a defence.”
“What are the aftereffects?” Ramad asked.
“We do not know. We took him out of his cell and shot him.”
That was to be expected.
Salmi nodded at Mufti.
The captain started the video machine again. It was the same cell, Ramad supposed, but the prisoner was a different man, taller, thicker. And he was just as dejected as the first man. The stool was closer to the wall. He sat on the stool with his head leaning against the wall. Tears streamed down his face.
“Toxin this time,” Salmi said.
“The botulism?”
“No, the Leader ruled that out, even though chemically based toxins do not create epidemics, as do the organically based compounds. The designation for this one is TR-11.”
Ramad knew the nomenclature. This toxin acted similarly to a psychological agent, but created abject terror in those subjected to it.
The base of the cell suddenly spurted white fog from half-a-dozen jets.
The man noticed immediately, and his face turned up toward the camera. Ramad could see the pleading in his eyes.
The fog roiled around his legs, rising.
There was no sound, but Ramad saw the man’s mouth working. Please. Oh, Allah, please.
He climbed up on the stool, attempting to stay above the fog.
The fog began to disperse, a white haze filling the room so that the prisoner’s movements were difficult to follow.
From the video, Ramad could tell the man was no longer begging God for mercy.
He was screaming.
His eyes rolled in their sockets.
His body recoiled from nothing seen.
He fell off the stool, knocking it across the cell. He immediately rose to his knees, slithered into the comer, backed into it.
His balled-up fists struck out at something, anything, the wall. In minutes his knuckles were bloodied from striking the rough concrete walls.
The screen went blank.
“We waited forty minutes before shooting him,” Salmi said. “He never came out of his acute terror.”
Ramad nodded his head affirmatively.
“A consequence we had not considered,” Salmi said, “was that, in his terror, he was difficult to control.”
“I can understand that,” Ramad said.
“It will be interesting to see how al-Qati’s troops deal with three or four thousand people acting the same way.”
Mufti started the video again.
This would be the nerve agent. The final formula had been labelled GB31, and it was a derivative of Sarin, an older agent that was almost removed from the stockpiles of other nations. The newer version was non-persistent, precluding the necessity for decontaminating an area where it had been used.
Again, the cell appeared on the screen, though it now contained a woman. She was a pretty woman, and she was naked, perhaps for the enjoyment of her jailers.
She was afraid, ignoring the stool to curl against the far wall, holding her arms and hands in front of her.
She was weeping, perhaps sadly, but quite definitely quietly.
There was no visible release of the gas.
The woman became aware that something was wrong with her, and she forgot her modesty.
She leapt to her feet, her small breasts bobbing, her head rotating from side to side as she sought to find whatever it was that alarmed her.
Ramad saw her cheeks twitching. A tic in one eye. Her arm jerked.
“This attacks the nerve centres very quickly, Ibrahim. Muscle control is lost rapidly.”
Her legs went out from under her, and she crashed to the floor.