In a sense, Solkov had become a dichotomy. He lived modestly in a second-floor apartment near the Sirkeci railway station on his pension as a former KGB officer. He often played cards until the early hours of the morning with a group of men in the old Galta section of the city and caught the Banliyo tren to return home. Those who knew him, and they were few, would have agreed he was a socialist, yet they would have also readily admitted he cherished the finer things Istanbul had to offer. He attended the opera and ballet and was known to spend hours in the library.
His other passion was food. He had once informed his fellow cardplayers that if he could not be interred in his Russian homeland, he wanted to be buried at the Sakarya Caddesi, his favorite eating place in all of Istanbul. Now, however, four days after his last contact with Doronkin, he found himself returning to his apartment early each evening to listen to the news and wait for the call from Ammash.
On this particular night, he had read until well after midnight and fallen asleep in his reading chair sometime after that. He could remember catching fragments of the final state-owned newscast of the day.
Now, as he attempted to shake off the uncomfortable lethargy that follows shallow sleep, he pushed his bulk out of the chair, glanced down, and saw the red light on his phone blinking. He picked up the receiver, pressed the button on the voice recorder, and waited for the transmission to begin. The caller spoke in digits — a series of five digits per burst. The first five numbers in the sequence numbers were all threes, and Solkov knew it was a transmission from his contact in Ammash. He stopped the tape, pressed the button a second time, and waited for the transmission to run its course. Minutes later, the transmission was complete. The last three groups of five digits contained the date code and the time of the transmission.
Solkov checked his watch, reached up on the bookshelf over the television, took down his journal, and opened the well-worn book to page five.
Every third line was the key. He hit the playback button, jotted down the first group of numbers, deciphered them, and proceeded to the next. The task took almost an hour, but shortly after nine o’clock in the morning he had worked his way through the message. He was not surprised. When he had failed to hear from his contact within hours after Doronkin and the Jade representatives were due to arrive there, he had no other alternative than to believe something had gone wrong.
Solkov located his packet of maps, checked the location of Simak, and traced possible air routes from Sirnak to Arnmash. A crossing at Koboli Pass would have been the most direct route. As he looked at the map, myriad questions began racing through his mind. Disturbing, however, was the fact that at the moment, none of the questions had answers. He looked at the code, then the message, and reread the contents one final time:
…confirmed — unidentified helicopter downed in Koboli region four days ago. NIMF investigating…
After that, Josef Solkov stared at the message for a long time, lost in thought. For well over a year he and his comrades had carefully engineered the convoluted plot to assassinate the rebel Iraqi general Salih Baddour. They had done so in the belief that Baddour’s assassination would trigger an all-out war between the two Iraqi military factions. For months he had thought of nothing else — it had been in the forefront of his thoughts night and day — and now that plan was unraveling.
Sharif Khaldun stationed himself on an outcropping of rock overlooking the crash site of the Gazelle, and watched his men systematically work their way over the last one hundred yards toward the site of the wreckage. Their progress up to that point had been considerably easier than Khaldun had anticipated. In addition, the NIMF captain had been equally surprised to discover that up until now there had been nothing to indicate that Kurd guerrillas were aware of their presence.
Khaldun, a veteran of many of these forays into what his men referred to as Kurd strongholds, had rousted and organized his patrol when the first rays of sun began snaking their way into the canyon just after dawn. Thus far, the patrol had gone smoothly. Even the anticipated difficulties in getting the lumbering M-4 truck with its 14.5mm antiaircraft gun through the narrow Koboli pass had failed to materialize. The wreckage of the downed helicopter had been discovered within a thousand or so yards of where Nayef had indicated he would find it. With its discovery, Khaldun had breathed a sigh of relief. The mission was progressing with a minimum of hardship. Only the two attempts to establish radio contact with Ammash had proved fruitless. Even so, the NIMF officer continued his vigilance, squinting into the sun and constantly exploring the surrounding rocks and ledges around the crash site for signs of the Kurds.
The sun was in full view by the time his patrol had worked their way to the crash site, encircled the wreckage, and begun sorting through the debris. Only Sergeant Atiz, Khaldun’s squad leader, was still exhibiting caution when Khaldun himself reached the wreckage.
“The Kurds have been here, all right,” Atiz announced.
“There is evidence?” Khaldun asked.
Atiz held up his hand, stepped toward the wreckage, and started to point out the freshly dug earth to his captain. Just then, the first shot rang out. Within seconds Khaldun and his patrol were caught in a cross fire. He saw one of his men clutch at his throat and drop to his knees. Another pitched face-first into the charred debris of the wreckage. Even Atiz was unable to get off a shot before he was hit.
With the first volley still ringing in his ears, Khaldun jerked his Steyr AUG 9mm around, dropped to his knee, and managed to squeeze off two bursts, but by that time, it was too late. The Kurds had ceased firing and there was an ominous silence. One by one he saw the Kurd guerrillas begin to emerge from their hiding places.
It did not take Khaldun long to assess his situation; he had allowed himself to be lulled into a trap. He could count at least five Kurd guerrillas emerging from their hiding places, and he had no way of knowing how many more were still concealed.
He held up one hand, slowly dropped to one knee, and carefully laid the 9mm rifle on the ground at his feet. Then he stood up with both hands elevated.
Aman was the first to reach him.
“Unbuckle your cartridge belt,” he ordered. As soon as Khaldun complied, fourteen-year-old Haja raced in, scooped it up, and handed it to Aman.
“It was only a matter of time,” Aman said.
“From experience we have learned that the NIMF patrols are predictable. We knew that sooner or later you would come to investigate the crash site.”
Sharif Khaldun stiffened and waited. He would refuse to give his captors the satisfaction of a reply.
At the same time he was expecting the worst.
His was not the first patrol to be captured by Kurd guerrillas. For months stories had circulated of captured NIMF patrols being forced to dig their own graves, then blindfolded, having rags stuck in their mouths and shot. When the bodies weren’t buried, they were burned. Now Khaldun watched stoically as Aman signaled to one of his men.
A grinning Mahmud Aman approached, and his older brother handed him the Tokarev automatic.
“Check the wounded. If they are able to walk,” Aman instructed, “we will take them back to the settlement with us. You know what to do with the rest.”
Khaldun continued to watch as the Kurd youth slowly picked his way through the charred wreckage of the Gazelle and inspected each member of Khaldun’s fallen patrol. There was no hesitation on. his part. Each member of the wounded NIMF patrol received no more than a cursory inspection before Mahmud bent, placed the muzzle of the Tokarev at the base of each soldier’s skull, and pulled the trigger. After each execution the youth used a rag to wipe the blood and bone fragments from the weapon. Aman could tell that when he was finished, he was pleased with himself. There was a smile on his face when he returned the weapon to his brother and announced that he had taken care of the matter. Each of the surviving NIMF soldiers, he informed Aman, had been sufficiently wounded that they would have been unable to survive the trek back to the settlement.