Rowse was carrying his SAS-issue Browning 13-shot in his waistband at the back, under his blue duffle jacket. A scruffy woolen cap covered most of his head, and several days of stubble obscured his face. He looked like an Irish workman, which was his cover.
As Mahoney emerged, Rowse dropped into a crouch beside the petrol pump, pulled his gun, took up the double-handed aim position, and yelled, “Mahoney—freeze!”
Mahoney was fast. Even as Rowse was drawing, he was reaching for his own gun. By law, Rowse could have finished him there and then. Later, he wished he had. But he shouted again, “Drop it, or you’re dead!”
Mahoney had his gun out, but it was still by his side. He looked at the man half-hidden by the pump, saw the Browning, and knew he could not win. He dropped his Colt.
At that moment, two old ladies in a Volkswagen pulled onto the concrete apron of the filling station. They had no idea what was going on, but they drove straight between Rowse by the petrol pump and Mahoney by the wall. That was enough for the IRA man. He dropped like a stone and retrieved his gun. His partner tried to drive to his rescue, but Rowse’s backup man was beside him, a gun stuck straight through the car window into the man’s temple.
Rowse could not fire because of the two women, who had now stalled their engine and were sitting in their Volkswagen screaming. Mahoney came out from behind the Volkswagen, dodged around the back of a parked lorry, and ran out into the road. By the time Rowse cleared the lorry, Mahoney was in the middle of the highway.
At that moment, a Morris Minor drove by. The elderly driver of the Morris jammed on his brakes to avoid hitting the running man. Mahoney kept the Morris between himself and Rowse, hauled the old man out by the jacket, clubbed him to the ground with the Colt, jumped into the driving seat, and was off.
There was a passenger in the car. The old man had been taking his granddaughter to the circus in the Morris. Rowse, in the road, watched as the passenger door flew open and the child was thrown out. He heard her thin scream from down the road, saw her small body hit the road, then saw her body struck by an oncoming van.
“Yes,” said McCready softly, “we know it was him. Despite the eighteen witnesses who said he was at a bar in Dundalk at that hour.”
“I still write to her mother,” said Rowse.
“The Army Council wrote, too,” said McCready. “They expressed regret. Said she fell accidentally.”
“She was thrown,” said Rowse. “I saw his arm. He’s really going to be in charge of this?”
“We think so. We don’t know whether the transshipment will be by land, sea, or air, or where he’ll show up. But we think he’ll command the operation. You heard the tape.”
McCready briefed Rowse on his cover stories. He would have two, not one. The first would be reasonably transparent. With luck, those investigating it would penetrate the lie and discover the second story. With luck (again), they would be satisfied with the second cover.
“Where do I start?” asked Rowse as the week neared its end.
“Where would you like to start?” asked McCready.
“Anyone researching international arms traffic for his next novel would soon find out that the two European bases for that traffic are Antwerp and Hamburg,” said Rowse.
“True,” said McCready. “Do you have any contacts in either city?”
“There’s a man I know in Hamburg,” said Rowse. “He’s dangerous, crazy, but he may have contacts in the international underworld.”
“His name?”
“Kleist. Ulrich Kleist.”
“Jesus, you know some strange bastards, Tom.”
“I saved his butt once,” said Rowse. “At Mogadishu. He wasn’t crazy then. That came later, when someone turned his son into a druggie. The boy died.”
“Ah, yes,” said McCready, “that can have an effect. Right, Hamburg it is. I’ll be with you all the time. You won’t see me, and neither will the bad guys. But I’ll be there, somewhere nearby. If things turn sour, I’ll be close, with two of your former colleagues from the SAS Regiment. You’ll be okay— we’ll come for you if things get rough. I’ll need to contact you now and again for regular updates on progress.”
Rowse nodded. He knew it was a lie, but it was a nice one. McCready would need his regular updates so that if Rowse abruptly departed this planet, the SIS would know how far he had got. For Rowse possessed that quality so beloved of spymasters: He was quite dispensable.
Rowse arrived in Hamburg in the middle of May. He was unannounced, and he came alone. He knew McCready and the two “minders” had gone ahead of him. He did not see them, and he did not look. He realized he would probably know the two SAS men with McCready, but he did not have their names. It did not matter; they knew him, and their job was to stay close but invisible. It was their specialty. Both would be fluent German speakers. They would be at Hamburg Airport, in the streets, near his hotel, just watching and reporting to McCready, who would be farther back.
Rowse avoided the luxury hotels like the Vier Jahrzeiten and the Atlantik, choosing a more unpretentious hotel near the railway station. He had hired a small car from Avis and stuck to his modest budget, in keeping with the limitations of a moderately successful novelist trying to research his next book. After two days he found Ulrich Kleist, who was working as a forklift driver on the docks.
The big German had switched off his machine and was climbing down from the cab when Rowse called to him. For a second Kleist spun around, prepared to defend himself, then recognized Rowse. His craggy face broke into a grin.
“Tom. Tom, my old friend.”
Rowse was embraced in a crushing bear hug. When he was released, he stood back and looked at the former Special Forces soldier whom he had first met in a baking Somali airport in 1977 and had last seen four years ago. Rowse had been twenty-four then, and Kleist was six years his senior. But he looked as if he were older than forty now, much older.
On October 13, 1977, four Palestinian terrorists had hijacked a Lufthansa flight from Mallorca to Frankfurt, with eighty-six passengers and a crew of five. Tracked by the authorities, the captive jet had landed in succession at Rome, Larnaca, Bahrain, Dubai, and Aden before finally coming to rest, out of fuel, at Mogadishu, the bleak capital of Somalia.
Here, a few minutes after midnight on the night of October 17, the jet had been stormed by the West German special force, the GSG 9, which modeled itself on, and had been largely trained by, the British SAS. It had been the first foreign “outing” for Colonel Ulrich Wegener’s crack troops. They were good, very good, but two SAS sergeants had come along anyway. One was Tom Rowse—that was before he was commissioned.
The reason for the presence of the British was twofold. One, they were very experienced at taking off sealed airliner doors in a fraction of a second; two, they knew how to handle the British-developed stun grenades. These grenades produced three things designed to paralyze a terrorist for two vital seconds. One was the flash, which blinded the naked eye; one was the shock wave, which caused disorientation; the third was the bang, which rattled the brain through the eardrums and paralyzed reaction.
After the successful liberation of the Lufthansa airline, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt lined up the warriors and gave them all medals on behalf of a grateful nation. The two Britishers had vaporized before the politicians and the press could appear.
Although the two SAS sergeants had been there only as technical advisers—the British Labour government had been adamant on that—what had really happened was this: The British had gone up the ladder first in order to take off the rear passenger door. They had approached the airliner from behind and beneath to avoid detection by the terrorists.
Because it was impossible to change position at the top of an aluminium ladder in pitch darkness, the SAS men had gone through the gaping hole before the Germans and had thrown their stun grenades. Then they stepped aside to let the GSG 9 team pass them and finish the job. The first two Germans were Uli Kleist and another trooper. They entered the
center aisle and dropped flat as ordered, their guns trained forward toward where they had been told the terrorists would be.
And they were there, up by the forward bulkhead, recovering from the blast. Zohair Yussef Akache, alias Captain Mahmoud, who had already murdered the Lufthansa captain, Jürgen Schumann, was rising with a submachine gun in his hands. Beside him, one of the two women, Nadia Hind Alameh, was climbing to her feet with a grenade in one hand, her other hand reaching for the pin. Uli Kleist had never done it at point-blank range before, so Rowse stepped into the aisle from the lavatory bay and did it for him. Then the GSG 9 team finished the job, blowing away the second male terrorist, Nabi Ibrahim Harb, and wounding the other female, Suheila Saleh. In all, it had taken eight seconds.
Ten years later, Uli Kleist now stood in the sun on a Hamburg quayside and grinned at the slim young man who had fired those two shots over his head in the cramped airliner cabin so long ago.
“What brings you to Hamburg, Tom?”
“Let me buy you dinner, and I’ll tell you.”
They ate spicy Hungarian food at a csarda in one of the back streets of Sankt Pauli, well away from the bright lights and high prices of the Reeperbahn, and washed it down with Bull’s Blood. Rowse talked, Kleist listened.
“Ja, sounds like a good plot,” he said eventually. “I didn’t read your books yet. They are translated into German?”
“Not yet,” said Rowse. “My agent’s hoping to get a German contract. It would help—Germany’s a big market.”
“So, there is a living to be made from writing this thriller fiction?”
Rowse shrugged. “It pays the rent.”
“And this new one, the one about terrorists and arms dealers and the White House—you have a title for it?”
“Not yet.”
The German considered. “I will try and get you some information—research purposes only, yes?” He laughed and tapped his nose, as if to say, Of course, there’s more to it than that, but we all have to make a living.
“Give me twenty-four hours. I’ll talk with some friends, see if they know where you could get this sort of stuff. So, you have done well since leaving the Army. I—not so well.”
“I heard about your troubles,” said Rowse.
“Ach, two years in Hamburg jail. A piece of cake. Another two, and I could have been running the place. Anyway, it was worth it.”
Kleist, although divorced, had had a son. He had been only sixteen when someone turned him on to cocaine, then crack. The boy overdosed and died. Rage had made Uli Kleist rather unsubtle. He had found out the names of the Colombian wholesaler and the German distributor of the consignment that had killed his son, walked into a restaurant where they were dining, and blown both their heads off. When the police came, Kleist did not even resist. An old-school judge who shared his personal views about drug traffickers listened to the defense plea of provocation and gave Kleist four years. He served two, and had come out six months before. Word was, there was a contract on him. Kleist did not give a damn. Some said he was crazy.
They parted at midnight, and Rowse took a cab back to his hotel. A single man on a motorcycle followed all the way. The motorcyclist spoke twice into a hand-communicator. When Rowse paid off the taxi, McCready emerged from the shadows.
“You haven’t got a tail,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. Feel like a nightcap?”
They drank beer in an all-night bar near the station, and Rowse filled him in.
“He believes your tale of researching a novel is poppycock?” McCready asked.
“He suspects it.”
“Good—let’s hope he puts it about. I doubt if you’ll get to the real bad guys in this scenario. I’m rather hoping they’ll come to you.”
Rowse made a remark about feeling like the cheese in a mousetrap and climbed off his bar stool.
“In a successful mousetrap,” remarked McCready as he followed Rowse out of the bar, “the cheese does not get touched.”
“I know it, and you know it, but tell that to the cheese,” said Rowse, and retired to bed.
Rowse met Kleist the following evening. The German shook his head.
“I have asked around,” he said, “but what you mentioned is too sophisticated for Hamburg. That kind of material is made in government-owned laboratories and arms factories. It is not on the black market. But there is a man, or so is the whisper.”
“Here in Hamburg?”
“No, Vienna. The Russian military attaché there is a certain Major Vitali Kariagin. As you no doubt know, Vienna is the main outlet for the Czech manufacturer Omnipol. The broad mass of their exports they are allowed to make on their own account, but some stuff and some buyers have to be cleared out of Moscow. The channeling agent for these permissions is Kariagin.”
“Why should he help?”
“Word is, he has a taste for the good things of life. He’s GRU, of course, but even Soviet military intelligence officers have private tastes. It appears he likes girls—expensive girls, the sort to whom you have to give expensive presents. So he himself takes presents, cash presents, in envelopes.”
Rowse thought it over. He knew that corruption was more the rule than the exception in Soviet society, but a GRU major on the take? The arms world is very bizarre; anything is possible.
“By the way,” said Kleist, “in this ... novel of yours. Would there be any IRA in it?”
“Why do you ask?” said Rowse. He had not mentioned the IRA.
Kleist shrugged. “They have a unit here. Based in a bar run by Palestinians. They do liaison with other terror groups in the international community, and arms-buying. You want to see them?”
“In God’s name, why?”
Kleist laughed, a mite too loud. “Might be fun,” he said.
“These Palestinians—they know you once blew away four of their number?” asked Rowse.
“Probably. In our world everyone knows everyone. Especially their enemies. But I still go to drink in their bar.”
“Why?”
“Fun. Pulling the tiger’s tail.”
“You really are crazy,” thought Rowse.
“I think you should go,” said McCready later that night. “You might learn something, see something. Or they might see you and wonder why you are here. If they inquire, they’ll come up with the novel-researching story. They won’t believe it, and they’ll deduce you really are out buying weapons for use in America. Word gets around. We want it to get around. Just have a few beers, and stay cool. Then distance yourself from that mad German.”
McCready did not feel it necessary to mention that he knew of the bar in question. It was called the Mausehöhle, or Mousehole, and the rumor persisted that a German undercover agent, working for the British, had been unmasked and shot in an upstairs room there a year earlier. Certainly the man had disappeared without a trace. But there was not enough for the German police to raid the place, and German counterintelligence preferred to leave the Palestinians and the Irish where they were. Smashing up their headquarters would simply mean they would reestablish somewhere else. Still, the rumors persisted.
The following evening Uli Kleist paid off their cab on the Reeperbahn. He led Rowse up the Davidstrasse, past the steel-gated entrance to Herbertstrasse, where the whores sat night and day in their windows; past the brewery gates; and down to the far end where the Elbe glittered under the moon. He turned right into Bernhard Nochtstrasse and after two hundred yards stopped at a studded timber door.
He rang the discreet bell by its side, and a small grill slid back. An eye looked at him, there was a whispered conference inside, and the door opened. The doorman and the dinner-jacketed man beside him were both Arabs.
“Evening, Mr. Abdallah,” Kleist said cheerfully in German. “I’m thirsty, and I’d like a drink.”
Abdallah glanced at Rowse.
“Oh, he’s all right, he’s a friend,” said Kleist. The Arab nodded at the doorman, who opened the door wide to let them in. Kleist was big, but the doorm
an was massive, shaven-headed, and not to be trifled with. Years earlier, back in the camps in Lebanon, he had been an enforcer for the PLO. In a way, he still was.
Abdallah led them both to a table, summoned a waiter with a flick of the hand, and ordered in Arabic that his guests be looked after. Two busty bar-girls, both German, left the bar and sat at their table.
Kleist grinned. “I told you. No problem.”
They sat and drank. Now and then, Kleist danced with one of the girls. Rowse toyed with his drink and surveyed the room. Despite the sleazy street in which it was situated, the Mousehole was lushly decorated, the music was live, and the drink was unwatered. Even the girls were pretty and well dressed.
Some of the clientele were Arabs from abroad, others Germans. They seemed prosperous and concerned only with having a good time. Rowse had put on a suit; only Kleist remained in his brown leather bomber jacket over an open-neck shirt. Had he not been who he was, with the reputation he had, Mr. Abdallah might well have excluded him on grounds of dress.
Apart from the redoubtable doorman, Rowse could see no sign that this was a hangout for anything other than businessmen who were prepared to be parted from a lot of money in the hope, almost certainly to be dashed, of taking one of the bar-girls home. Most drank champagne; Kleist had ordered beer.
Above the bar, a large mirror dominated the seating area. It was a one-way mirror; behind it was the manager’s office. Two men stood and looked down,
“Who’s your man?” one asked softly in the harsh burr of Belfast.
“German called Kleist. Comes in occasionally. Once GSG 9. Not anymore—he’s on the outside. Did two years for murder.”
“Not him,” said the first man, “the other, the one with him. The Brit.”
“No idea, Seamus. Just came in.”
“Find out,” said the first man. “I think I’ve seen him somewhere before.”
They came in when Rowse was visiting the men’s room. He had used the urinal and was washing his hands when the two men entered. One approached the urinal, stood in front of it, and jiggled with his fly. He was the big one. The slimmer, good-looking Irishman stayed by the door. He slipped a small wooden wedge out of his jacket pocket, dropped it to the floor, and with the side of one foot eased it under the rest-room’s entrance door. There would be no distractions.