The Israeli thought he had seldom seen such a downcast little shrimp.
By the time the yarid girl came on the radio with a muttered warning that the banker’s wife was heading home, the neviot break-in experts were finished and out. The front door was relocked by the man in the telephone company uniform after the rest had scuttled out the back and through the garden.
From then on, the neviot team would man the tape recorders in the van down the street to listen to the goings-on inside the house.
Two weeks later a despairing team leader told Barzilai they had hardly filled one tape. On the first evening they had recorded eighteen words. She had said: “Here’s your dinner, Wolfgang”—no reply.
She had asked for new curtains—refused. He had said, “Early day tomorrow, I’m off to bed.”
“He says it every bloody night, it’s like he’s been saying it for thirty years,” complained the neviot man.
“Any sex?” asked Barzilai.
“You must be joking, Gidi. They don’t even talk, let alone screw.”
All other leads to a flaw in the character of Wolfgang Gemütlich came up zero. There was no gambling, no small boys, no socializing, no nightclubbing, no mistress, no scuttling through the red-light district. On one occasion he left the house, and the spirits of the trailing team rose. Gemütlich was in a dark coat and hat, on foot, after dark and after supper, moving through the darkened suburb until he came to a private house five blocks away.
He knocked and waited. The door opened, he was admitted, and it closed. Soon a ground-floor light came on, behind heavy drapes. Before the door closed, one of the Israeli watchers caught a glimpse of a grim-looking woman in a white nylon tunic.
Aesthetic baths, perhaps? Assisted showers, mixed sauna with two hefty wenches to handle the birch twigs? A check the next morning revealed that the woman in the tunic was an elderly chiropodist who ran a small practice from her own home. Wolfgang Gemütlich had been having his corns trimmed.
On the first of December, Gidi Barzilai received a rocket from Kobi Dror in Tel Aviv. This was not an operation without a limit of time, he was warned. The United Nations had given Iraq till January 16 to get out of Kuwait. After that, there would be war. Anything might happen. Get on with it.
“Gidi, we can follow this bastard till hell freezes over,” the two team leaders told their controller.
“There’s just no dirt in his life. I don’t understand the bastard. Nothing—he does nothing we can use on him.”
Barzilai was in a dilemma. They could kidnap the wife and threaten the husband that he had better cooperate or else. ... Trouble was, the sleaze would trade her in rather than steal a luncheon voucher.
Worse, he would call the cops.
They could kidnap Gemütlich and work him over. The trouble there was, the man would have to go back to the bank to make the transfer to close down the Jericho account. Once inside the bank, he’d yell blue murder. Kobi Dror had said, no miss and no traces.
“Let’s switch to the secretary,” Barzilai said. “Confidential secretaries often know everything their boss knows.”
So the two teams switched their attentions to the equally dull-looking Fräulein Edith Hardenberg.
She took even less time, just ten days. They tailed her to her home, a small apartment in a staid old house just off Trautenauplatz far out in the Nineteenth District, the northwestern suburb of Grinzing.
She lived alone. No lover, no boyfriend, not even a pet. A search of her private papers revealed a modest bank account, a mother in retirement in Salzburg. The apartment itself had once been rented by the mother, as the rent book showed, but the daughter had moved in seven years earlier when the mother returned to her native Salzburg.
Edith drove a small Seat car, which she parked on the street outside the flat, but she mainly commuted to work by public transportation, no doubt due to the parking difficulties in the city center.
Her pay stubs revealed a stingy salary—“mean bastards,” exploded the neviot searcher when he saw the sum—and her birth certificate revealed she was thirty-nine—“and looking fifty,” remarked the searcher.
There were no pictures of men in the flat, just one of her mother, one of them both on vacation by some lake, and one of her apparently deceased father in the uniform of the customs service.
If there was any man in her life, it appeared to be Mozart.
“She’s an opera buff, and that’s all,” the neviot team leader reported back to Barzilai, after the flat had been left exactly as they found it. “There’s a big collection of LP records—she hasn’t gotten around to compact disks yet—and they’re all opera. Must spend most of her spare cash on them. Books on opera, on composers, singers, and conductors. Posters of the Vienna Opera winter calendar, though she couldn’t begin to afford a ticket.”
“No man in her life, eh?” mused Barzilai.
“She might fall for Pavarotti, if you can get him. Apart from that, forget it.”
But Barzilai did not forget it. He recalled a case in London, long ago. A civil servant in Defence, real spinster type; then the Sovs had produced this stunning young Yugoslav ... even the judge had been sympathetic at her trial.
That evening Barzilai sent a long encrypted cable to Tel Aviv.
By the middle of December, the buildup of the Coalition army south of the Kuwaiti border had become a great, inexorable tidal wave of men and steel.
Three hundred thousand men and women of thirty nations stretched in a series of lines across the Saudi desert from the coast and westward for over a hundred miles.
At the ports of Jubail, Dammam, Bahrain, Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai the cargo ships came in from the sea to disgorge guns and tanks, fuel and stores, food and bedding, ammunition and spares in endless succession.
From the docks the convoys rolled west along the Tapline Road to establish the vast logistic bases that would one day supply the invading army.
A Tornado pilot from Tabuq, flying south from a feint attack on the Iraqi border, told his squadron colleagues he had flown over the nose of a convoy of trucks and then on to the tail of the line. At five hundred miles per hour, it had taken him six minutes to reach the end of the line of trucks fifty miles away, and they had been rolling nose to tail.
At Logistic Base Alpha one compound had oil drums stacked three high on top of each other, on pallets six feet by six, with lines between them the width of a forklift truck. The compound was forty kilometers by forty.
And that was just for fuel. Other compounds at Log Alpha had shells, rockets, mortars, caissons of machine-gun rounds, armor-piercing antitank warheads, and grenades. Others contained food and water, machinery and spares, tank batteries and mobile workshops.
At that time the Coalition forces were confined by General Schwarzkopf to the portion of desert due south of Kuwait. What Baghdad could not know was that before he attacked, the American general intended to send more forces across the Wadi al Batin and another hundred miles farther west into the desert, to invade Iraq itself, pushing due north and then east to take the Republican Guard in flank and destroy it.
On December 13 the Rocketeers, the 336th Squadron of the USAF Tactical Air Command, left their base at Thumrait in Oman and transferred to Al Kharz in Saudi Arabia. It was a decision that had been made on December 1.
Al Kharz was a bare-bones airfield, constructed with runways and taxi tracks but nothing else. No control tower, no hangars, no workshops, no accommodations for anyone—just a flat sheet in the desert with strips of concrete.
But it was an airfield. With amazing foresight, the Saudi government had commissioned and built enough air bases to host an air power totaling more than five times the Royal Saudi Air Force.
After December 1 the American construction teams moved in. In just thirty days a tented city capable of housing five thousand people and five fighter squadrons had been built.
Principal among the builders were the heavy engineers, the Red Horse teams, backed by forty huge elec
tric generators from the Air Force. Some of the equipment came by road on low-loaders, but most by air. They built the clamshell hangars, workshops, fuel stores, ordnance depots, flight and briefing rooms, operations rooms, control towers, store tents, and garages.
For the aircrew and ground crew they erected streets of tents with roadways between, latrines, bathhouses, kitchens, mess halls, and a water tower to be replenished by convoys of trucks from the nearest water source.
Al Kharz lies fifty miles southeast of Riyadh, which turned out to be just three miles beyond the maximum range of the Scud missiles in Iraq’s possession. It would be home for three months to five squadrons: two of F-15E Strike Eagles—the 336th Rocketeers and the Chiefs, the 335th Squadron out of Seymour Johnson, who joined at this point; one of F-15C pure-fighter Eagles; and two of F-16
Falcon fighters.
There was a special street for the 250 female personnel in the wing; these included the lawyer, ground-crew chiefs, truck drivers, clerks, nurses, and two squadron intelligence officers.
The aircrew flew themselves up from Thumrait; the ground crew and other staff came by cargo airplane.
The entire transshipment took two days, and when they arrived, the engineers were still at work and would remain so until Christmas.
Don Walker had enjoyed his time in Thumrait. Living conditions were modern and excellent, and in the relaxed atmosphere of Oman, alcoholic drinks were permitted within the base.
For the first time, he had met the British SAS, who have a permanent training base there, and other
“contract officers” serving with the Omani forces of Sultan Qaboos. Some memorable parties were held, members of the opposite sex were eminently datable, and flying the Eagles on feint missions up to the Iraqi border had been great.
Of the SAS, after a trip into the desert with them in light scout cars, Walker had remarked to the newly appointed squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Turner:
“These guys are certifiably insane.”
Al Kharz would turn out to be different from Thumrait. As the home of the two holy places, Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia enforces strict teetotalism, as well as any exposure of the female form below the chin, excluding hands and feet.
In his General Order Number, One, General Schwarzkopf had banned all alcohol for the entire Coalition forces under his command. All American units abided by that order, and it strictly applied at Al Kharz.
At the port of Dammam, however, the American off-loaders were bemused by the amount of shampoo destined for the British Royal Air Force. Crate after crate of the stuff was unloaded, put onto trucks or C-130 Hercules air-freighters, and brought to the RAF squadrons. They remained puzzled that in a largely waterless environment, the British aircrew could spend so much time washing their hair. It was an enigma that would continue to puzzle them until the end of the war.
At the other side of the peninsula, on the desert base of Tabuq, which British Tornados shared with American Falcons, the USAF pilots were even more intrigued to see the British at sundown, seated beneath their awnings, decanting a small portion of shampoo into a glass and topping it up with bottled water.
At Al Kharz the problem did not arise—there was no shampoo. Conditions, moreover, were more cramped than at Thumrait. Apart from the wing commander, who had a tent to himself, the others from colonel on down shared on the basis of two, four, six, eight, or twelve to a tent, according to rank.
Even worse, the female personnel were out of bounds, a problem made even more frustrating by the fact that the American women, true to their culture and with no Saudi Mutawa—religious police—to see them, took to sun-bathing in bikinis behind low fences that they erected around their tents.
This led to a rush by the aircrew to commandeer all the hilux trucks on the base, vehicles with their chassis set high above the wheels. Only from the top of these, standing on tiptoe, could a real patriot proceed from his tent to the flight lines, passing through an enormous diversion to drive down the street between the female tents, and check that the women were in good shape.
Apart from these civic obligations, for most it was back to a creaking cot and the “happy sock.”
There was also a new mood for another reason. The United Nations had issued its January 15 deadline to Saddam Hussein. The declarations coming out of Baghdad remained defiant. For the first time it became clear that they were going to go to war. The training missions took on a new and urgent edge.
For some reason, December 15 in Vienna was quite warm. The sun shone, and the temperature rose. At the lunch hour Fräulein Hardenberg left the bank as usual for her modest lunch and decided on a whim to buy sandwiches and eat them in the Stadtpark a few blocks away from the Ballgasse.
It was her habit to do this through the summer and even into the autumn, and for this she always brought her sandwiches with her. On December 15 she had none.
Nevertheless, looking at the bright blue sky above Franzis-kanerplatz and protected by her neat tweed coat, she decided that if nature was going to offer, even for one day, a bit of Altweibersommer —old ladies’ summer, to the Viennese—she would take advantage and eat in the park.
There was a special reason she loved the small park across the Ring. At one end is the Hübner Kursalon, a glass-walled restaurant like a large conservatory. Here during the lunch hour a small orchestra is wont to play the melodies of Strauss, that most Viennese of composers.
Without being able to afford to lunch there, others can sit outside the enclosure and enjoy the music for free. Moreover, in the center of the park, protected by his stone arch, stands the statue of the great Johann himself.
Edith Hardenberg bought her sandwiches at a local lunch-bar, found a park bench in the sun, and nibbled away while she listened to the waltz tunes.
“Entschuldigung.”
She jumped, jerked out of her reverie by the low voice saying “Excuse me.”
If there was one thing Miss Hardenberg would have none of, it was being addressed by a complete stranger. She glanced to her side.
He was young and dark-haired, with soft brown eyes, and his voice had a foreign accent. She was about to look firmly away again when she noticed the young man had an illustrated brochure of some kind in his hand and was pointing at a word in the text. Despite herself she glanced down. The brochure was the illustrated program notes for The Magic Flute .
“Please, this word—it is not German, no?”
His forefinger was pointing at the word portitura .
She should have left there and then, of course, just gotten up and walked away. She began to rewrap her sandwiches.
“No,” she said shortly, “it’s Italian.”
“Ah,” said the man apologetically. “I am learning German, but I do not understand Italian. Does it mean the story, please?”
“No,” she said, “it means the score, the music.”
“Thank you,” he said with genuine gratitude. “It is so hard to understand your Viennese operas, but I do love them so much.”
Her fingers slowed in their flutter to wrap the remaining sandwiches and leave.
“It is set in Egypt, you know,” the young man explained. Such nonsense, to tell her that, she who knew every word of Die Zauberflö te .
“Indeed it is,” she said. This had gone far enough, she told herself. Whoever he was, he was a very impudent young man. Why, they were almost in conversation. The very idea.
“The same as Aï da ,” he remarked, back to studying his program notes. “I like Verdi, but I think I prefer Mozart.”
Her sandwiches were rewrapped; she was ready to go. She should just stand up and go. She turned to look at him, and he chose that moment to look up and smile.
It was a very shy smile, almost pleading; brown spaniel eyes topped by lashes a model would have killed for.
“There is no comparison,” she said. “Mozart is the master of them all.”
His smile widened, showing even white teeth.
“He lived he
re once. Perhaps he sat here, right on this bench, and made his music.”
“I’m sure he did no such thing,” she said. “The bench was not here then.”
She rose and turned. The young man rose too and gave a short Viennese bow.
“I am sorry I disturbed you, Fräulein. But thank you for your help.”
She was walking out of the park, back to her desk to finish her lunch, furious with herself. Conversations with young men in parks—whatever next? On the other hand, he was only a foreign student trying to learn about Viennese opera. No harm in that, surely. But enough is enough. She passed a poster. Of course; the Vienna Opera was staging The Magic Flute in three days. Perhaps it was part of the young man’s study course.
Despite her passion, Edith Hardenberg had never been to an opera in the Staatsoper. She had, of course, roamed the building when it was open in the daytime, but an orchestra ticket had always been beyond her.
They were almost beyond price. Season tickets for the opera were handed down from generation to generation. A season’s abonnement was for the seriously rich. Other tickets could be obtained only by influence, of which she had none. Even ordinary tickets were beyond her means. She sighed and returned to her work.
That one day of warm weather had been the end. The cold and the gray clouds came back. She returned to her habit of lunching at her usual café and at her usual table. She was a very neat lady, a creature of habit.
On the third day after the park she arrived at her table at the usual hour, to the minute, and half-noticed that the one next to her was occupied. There was a pair of student books—she did not bother with the titles—and a half-drunk glass of water.
Hardly had she ordered the meal of the day when the occupant of the table returned from the men’s room. It was not until he sat down that he recognized her and gave a start of surprise.
“Oh, Grü ss Gott —again,” he said. Her lips tightened into a disapproving line. The waitress arrived and put down her meal. She was trapped. But the young man was irrepressible.
“I finished the program notes. I think I understand it all now.”