Ben’s hand reached for the microphone, but stopped in midgesture. In the distance, he could hear cheering.
“Take two men down to the lecture theater,” he said quietly to Fatima. “Two men and the machine gun.”
Salah stepped over the body of the boy at the stair-head and glanced around the corner into a long, broad corridor. A flash of movement at the far end was followed by a burst of fire. He jerked back as the corner of the wall exploded into splinters. Then Martyr was there beside him, face white, hands shaking. It might have been fear but Salah knew better. “We’re pinned down here,” he whispered. “Long corridor. Good man at the far end. We’ll have to look for another way up.”
“Why bother?” asked Martyr. “Chuck a grenade.”
Salah slung another thunderflash around the corner and Martyr was gone after it on a count of three. He departed, seemingly, into the thunderous glare of it and Salah wasn’t far behind. Martyr was halfway up the corridor, AK-47 at his hip, hosing the far corner with fire. The thin wood of the prefabricated wall turned into a smoking colander and the terrorist using it for cover collapsed into view. Martyr ran over to him and kicked his weapons away. “Let’s get going,” he said.
Salah ran back for the bags with the American at his shoulder and a frown on his face. He was paired with a man who had decided he had nothing left to live for, and that was very worrying indeed.
Fatima flattened herself against the wall just outside the control center and listened as though her life depended upon it. Her men ran on before her with the generalpurpose machine gun as Ben had ordered, but she was slower to obey. Ben spoke tersely to the Iranian naval officer at Queshm, the same man who had overseen the movement of the hostages from Prometheus to Fate; the man who was relying on Ben and the rest of them to close the Gulf and save his bacon before he became another victim of the ruthless purge going on in Iran at the moment. This part of the plan she knew all about and understood. But from the moment Ben had let slip that there was more going on — about that other timetable he had mentioned aboard Prometheus while they had been waiting for the gunboats to move the hostages — she had been on guard. It had been the final piece in a pattern of growing mistrust she could now see stretching back for a surprisingly long time.
At every opportunity she had spied and watched and listened, trying to discover what this man whom she had trusted with so much for so long was keeping hidden from her. And now, at this last moment, her efforts were rewarded. For, the moment Ben broke contact with Queshm, he was ordering Ali to contact someone else — and Fatima’s blood was running cold at the sound of his calm, hypocritical, lying voice.
“Get me Dahran now,” said Ben. “Here is the wavelength and the call sign.”
“Through,” answered Ali almost at once.
“This is the Dawn of Freedom,” said Ben, in English, which only he and Fatima understood, clearly speaking into the microphone. “I wish to speak to His Excellency Prince Assad.”
There was the briefest of silences and then Ben’s voice continued, dripping unctuousness, “Your Excellency, we are ready. Everything is at last complete. Please transfer the payment now. Yes, now is the time for you and your associates to move in Aqaba, before the story breaks worldwide. My payment: as you rightly recall, one hundred thousand American dollars a day into the Swiss account. No, it has not gone absolutely smoothly, but we have nothing to fear. The reinforcements are coming in from Queshm as arranged. Yes, it will look like an Iranian affair as planned. Yes, of course the Americans will continue to hesitate, everyone will, and the Gulf will stay closed for as long as possible. Only through Aqaba, yes…”
Fatima turned away and ran on down the stairs after her men, only a moment or two behind them, so briefly had she needed to pause. She had eavesdropped for such a short time, but what she had learned was such a complete reversal of everything she had believed. She felt an overwhelming urge to stop and scream but she ran on in a daze of shock, her lean body moving by instinct. Her mind could feel itself thinking, so deep was the shock. It was like the moment she had realized the truth about her father’s so-called illness and his actual plans for her. She could hardly believe it was happening to her all over again. Blindly she ran on, her breath coming in ragged sobs, something deep inside her crying, “Trapped, trapped, trapped; betrayed, betrayed, betrayed.”
Ben’s plan stood fully revealed and so easy to understand now. The greed behind all that cant about liberating their brothers and sisters in the great international army of freedom fighters. The lies he had told about his friends in Iran — the lies he must have told to his friends in Iran. All so he could close the Gulf, as he was just about to do, not in the cause of freedom or in the cause of justice, but for a hundred thousand dollars a day. American dollars. In his own Swiss bank account.
To be paid by the men in Dahran who controlled the refineries at the port of Aqaba. Aqaba, at the far end of the longest desert oil pipeline of all. Aqaba, on the Red Sea. Aqaba, the only way left to get crude out of the whole of Arabia when the Strait of Hormuz was closed. And how much would it be worth then to be the only people in the Middle East able to supply any oil at all? Compared with the likely profits of such a scheme, one hundred thousand dollars a day was less than nothing.
And then, there was the source of the money to be considered, too. That certainly bore careful thinking about. For Ben’s blood money was due to be paid by His Excellency, Prince Assad.
His Excellency, Prince Assad: her father.
Two terrorists came round the corner at a run, without having checked ahead. It was such a gross mistake under these circumstances that it all but beggared belief. Certainly the confrontation was so unexpected that everyone froze. Richard, Kerem, and Twelve Toes had been moving forward so carefully in case their enemies were waiting in ambush, that to have two of them jump out like this was, to say the least, surprising. The five men stood there for an instant, about three feet apart. Then Richard hit the nearest on the side of the head with the stock of his gun. It was a roundhouse right hook, and would probably have felled the man even had Richard not been holding the MP-5. As it was, the first terrorist, instantly unconscious, flew into the second one, knocking him down as well. Kerem’s desert boot finished the almost silent exchange. “More presents,” said Richard lightly, as they stripped the men of their weapons. “Kerem, take these back to the others. Make yourself up a little commando unit of three. Look for Salah and C. J. Then come looking for me.”
Kerem was gone almost at once. “Now, remind me,” said Richard to the chief steward, “How should a turkey be trussed?”
The cheers that greeted Salah and C. J. were almost as loud as the cheers that had greeted Richard. Within moments the guns they brought had been distributed and the hostages were surging toward the doors like the mob assaulting the Bastille. None of the men notionally in charge could hold them and they dashed out into the corridor, looking for terrorists to kill. They found three immediately. Fortunately for Prometheus’s crew, Fatima, just catching up with her men, did not have time to deploy the machine gun properly, or she would have killed most of that first wave, if not all of them. The man holding the GPMG opened fire at them with it at once and all but blew himself off his feet. The tracer shots went high and wide, tearing prefabricated walls and ceilings into smoking ruins before it jammed. Fatima and the second man flicked the safeties off their assault rifles, and the shouting mob was gone.