A Gentleman's Game Read online

  Then he thought of the APC and reconsidered. Aamil had fired his weapon, and it was luck, it seemed, that had kept anyone from hearing the shot. In another house, if it happened again, Sinan doubted they would be so lucky a second time. Even more, he doubted that they would be able to kill those descendants of apes and pigs in silence.

  Aamil was right, but for the wrong reasons.

  It was time to go.

  •

  They waited until full darkness had descended and the APC had passed by the house three more times, now shining its mounted halogen lights into yards and alleys. Each time it passed, Sinan could see the soldier at the spot, and each time, Sinan imagined a bullet from his gun entering the soldier’s head, and his finger slid from its safe position alongside the guard to the trigger, feeling the curve of metal against the pad of his forefinger. But he kept the gun down, resisting the urge despite his craving to seize the opportunity.

  At last they emerged, sprinting quick and low across the street, between the settlement houses, across a wide backyard, making toward the barbed-wire fence. Sinan led as fast as he could, but this wasn’t the way they’d come into the settlement, and he wasn’t entirely certain they were heading in the right direction. He tried to remember the map Abdul Aziz had shown him, tried to remember where the gap had been cut in the wire. It occurred to him that they should have left the weapons behind, in the house, in case they were spotted. He still had his passport, the passport he had used to enter the Zionists’ so-called state, and if they were stopped, there was the chance he could bluff.

  It had gotten him into Ma’le Efraim, after all, traveling as a man named William Leacock. It had gotten him, and two automatic rifles, and two grenades this far.

  William Leacock’s last act, Sinan thought. After this, the name would be dead forever, known and therefore useless.

  They ran across a dirt track, a narrow patrol road running between the outskirts of the settlement and the fence that surrounded it. The fence had been described as barbed wire, but Sinan knew it was more than that, not simply lines of cruel metal but rather a sharpened grate, impossible to climb quickly without perilous lacerations. He saw the shine of the metal in the starlight, surged forward, and the terrain dropped abruptly beneath his feet, turning into a shallow slope. He stumbled, hitting his knees and falling forward, and the fence clattered as his rifle collided against it.

  Sinan righted himself in a scramble, Aamil dropping to a crouch beside him, and he could barely make out his friend’s expression, the anger at the noise, the fear of what it might bring. He looked away, focusing instead on the fence, where their escape passage had been cut.

  Except it wasn’t.

  At first Sinan put it down to the darkness, the only illumination from the stars above and the dim ambience of the settlement lights. Breathless from the run and the fall, with Aamil hovering close beside, squinting at the barbed links in front of him, he realized they were in the wrong place. He quickly looked down the length of the wire in both directions, trying to find a landmark, something to place him on the remembered map, but the night had stolen all markers, and with a bubble of fear in his stomach, he realized they were lost.

  “Go on!” Aamil whispered urgently. “What are you waiting for?”

  “It’s not here,” Sinan hissed. “It’s not here, this isn’t it.”

  Somewhere behind them, a dog began to bark.

  “Shit,” Aamil muttered, dropping against the slope and freeing his rifle from his shoulder.

  Sinan followed suit, pressing himself against the cracked earth, just as the lights began coming on in the houses they’d left behind. The dog continued its alarm, growing more frantic, and he heard another dog joining in, this one sounding closer, to their left. Halogen bounced off the ground above their heads, cracking the darkness, and in its spill he could see Aamil, the fear on his face, and he shared it. If they were lucky, the Zionists would kill them. If they weren’t, they’d become prisoners, and he’d heard enough stories from others in the camp to know what that meant. Torture at the hands of the Zionists, how they used water and electricity, how they fed their prisoners the blood and flesh of Muslim children.

  “They don’t take us alive,” Sinan whispered.

  Aamil responded with an urgent, spastic nod. They could hear voices in the distance now, alarmed but cautious. From farther away, the sound of the APC’s engine coming closer. And the damn dogs were still yapping, and if anything, now it sounded like there were more of them.

  Sinan rolled softly onto his back, holding his rifle against his chest. The rifle was a Kalashnikov, his Kalashnikov, fully loaded and ready for work, and he pressed it against him with one hand, reaching into his coat with his other. The grenade in his pocket was smooth and cool and reassuringly solid as he wrapped his palm around it, pulling it free. He glanced to Aamil, waiting for his friend to do the same thing. Aamil hesitated, then licked his lips and quickly followed suit.

  The APC was coming along the track now, they could hear the rocks and pebbles crackling beneath its tires, its engine so low Sinan could almost believe it was on idle. The dogs had been silenced, and he strained his ears, trying to make out voices. Lights were being shined along the fence up the road, filling the little gully where they lay, making their way closer.

  Sinan watched the beams approaching, felt his heart beat so fiercely in his chest he was certain his rifle would fly from his body. He moved the grenade in his right hand onto his chest, reached over the rifle with his left, slid his index finger through the metal pin. If his throw was true, if Allah was with him, perhaps he could drop it into the APC and take the soldiers with him. It wouldn’t be enough to win freedom, he accepted that. Even if the soldiers fell, the settlers were surely armed, it would end the same way. But he would have taken more of these kufar with him, and that was the only thought in his mind now.

  “Look!” Aamil whispered, pointing past Sinan and up the length of the gully. “Look!”

  Sinan snapped his head around, feeling the dirt grinding into the back of his head, and it took his eyes a moment to register what he was seeing past the light, the darkness in the fence. At its base, near one of the posts, fifty or sixty feet away, the gap that had been cut for their escape.

  Aamil was already starting to move, dropping down to the bottom of the shallow gully, rifle in one hand, grenade in the other. Sinan began to push himself forward, to follow, then stopped, watching as his friend prowled farther away. Digging his feet into the earth, Sinan pushed himself up toward the road, peering over the edge of the slope.

  The APC was crawling along, the spot now drawing carefully along the fence, when suddenly it stopped moving. He heard a soldier’s shouted exclamation and the APC ground to a halt. The spotlight readjusted, focused on the gap at the base of the fence, where the sheeting and wire had been cut and pulled away. Sinan heard weapons being readied, orders exchanged, and the first soldier dropped from the vehicle to the ground, readying his weapon, as another moved to take position behind the mounted machine gun.

  Sinan looked up the gully, saw that Aamil had realized what was happening, that there was no way out for him. He watched as his friend dropped to his knees, laying his rifle carefully at his side, and Sinan thought it was odd, but perhaps he was just preparing to throw the grenade. Then Aamil set the grenade on the ground, too, and raised his arms, folded his hands behind his head, and Sinan felt his mouth dry as if filling with sand. The impact of the betrayal was so sudden and so unexpected that, for a moment, he lost his breath.

  One of the soldiers was shouting, coming down into the gully toward Aamil, another covering them both, and all under the shadow of the APC’s machine gun. Aamil was shoved roughly into the ground facefirst, his rifle and the grenade kicked away. The soldier worked quickly, his knee in Aamil’s back, binding Aamil’s hands together with a plastic tie. Once finished, he used the cuffs as a handle, jerking Aamil upright, forcing him toward the APC.

  Sinan waited until
they were about to load Aamil into the vehicle before he ripped the pin from the grenade in his hand. He threw it hard, underhand, heard the soft metallic ring of the handle as it sprang away from the casing. It landed short of the APC, bounced, and Sinan brought the Kalashnikov up and against his shoulder and fired a burst from the rifle, bullets clattering against the APC, striking the armor of the soldier at the machine gun. They shouted, began to react, turning to return fire.

  The grenade detonated, just to the side of the vehicle, and Sinan dropped back into the gully, sprinting half the distance toward the gap in the fence. He heard screams but no more shots, and he risked another view, leading with his rifle, and saw that one of the soldiers, bloodied and cut, was trying to regain his feet. Sinan loosed another burst from the rifle, and the soldier slumped against the vehicle, toppled to the ground.

  He dropped back again, ran the rest of the way to the gap in the fence, and was about to crawl through when he thought again about Aamil, more precisely, what if Aamil was still alive? He couldn’t leave him like this, not if he was still breathing, and it meant he had to check, and already he could hear the doors opening, the dogs going again.

  Sinan clambered back up the slope. The lights on the APC still burned but were unfocused, without motion, and he had sufficient darkness to risk skirting the track directly as he made his way back to the vehicle. The soldier who had manned the machine gun was slumped at an almost comical angle on his side, half out of the vehicle, and another was splayed out flat, facing the heavens, at the rear.

  Aamil was trying to pull himself into the APC, whimpering with the effort and with pain. Blood flowed from beneath the knee of his left leg, the flesh savaged by shrapnel, and Sinan saw that the grenade had caught his left arm as well. He slowed, cradling the rifle in both hands.

  “Aamil?”

  His friend started, as if surprised, then released his hold on the APC, leaving a blood smear where his palm had rested. He turned his head and Sinan saw dirt and blood mixed in Aamil’s beard, an almost-vacant expression in his eyes. Aamil blinked, as if he needed to reset his eyes.

  “Shuneal . . . ,” Aamil said. “Shuneal, help me. . . .”

  “God is great,” Sinan told him, and this time he didn’t bother to raise the Kalashnikov to his shoulder, just fired from the hip, two quick bursts. The first tore through Aamil’s pelvis, the second hitting higher, climbing the chest, and Aamil flopped back onto the APC. Then gravity took him, tugging him to the ground.

  Sinan didn’t see it. He was already through the gap in the fence and making for the Jordan River.

  8

  London—Vauxhall Cross,

  Office of the Deputy Chief of Service

  17 August 0959 GMT

  Crocker hadn’t closed the door to the Deputy Chief’s office before Donald Weldon was offering him a red file folder.

  “Read,” Weldon said.

  The folder was labeled “Most Secret,” but the operation designation line had been left blank. A bar code had been assigned, stuck to the lower-right corner of the front of the file, and the tracking boxes along the front were empty but for four entries: C at 0723 that morning; Weldon at 0808; Rayburn at 0858; and Weldon again at 0949.

  Crocker knew what it was without opening it, but he did so anyway, to be certain of the particulars. Within were two sheets, clipped together, neatly typed. The first was a directive from the Prime Minister, authorizing SIS to undertake action as described in the concept of operations following. Despite the nature of the operation, Crocker noted that the PM had omitted any reference to retaliation or retribution. Instead, he’d declared the proposed action as one of self-defense and protection vital to the Crown and its holdings.

  The second sheet was the conops, as prepared by the Intelligence Oversight Committee, including the Prime Minister, C, and various other members of the FCO and Cabinet, as well as the Chief of the Defense Staff. It was, even given the vaguely legal nature of its language, short to the point of being curt: it ordered SIS Director of Operations Paul Crocker to immediately plan and execute the assassination of Dr. Faud bin Abdullah al-Shimmari.

  Minor provisions were given, all of them standard. The operation was to be carried out with due care to prevent collateral damage to secondary targets, but only in furtherance of primary mission objective; requisite concealment of authorizing agency and operative(s), inclusive; declassification date declared fifty years to the day of mission completion. The mission completion date was open-ended, and Crocker presumed that was Rayburn’s doing, considering that Faud was most likely at his home in Jeddah, and there was no way in the world they’d be able to hit him there and get away with it.

  There were things that were different about this conops, though, things that it took Crocker a moment to realize. There was no equivocating, no double-speak. It was as blunt a directive as he had ever received, in that sense, and the message was clear: Kill Faud, we don’t give a damn how. Even the clause excusing collateral damage “in furtherance of primary mission objective,” the Government’s way of saying that if an agent had to, perhaps, machine-gun three of Faud’s closest friends on the way to target, well, it was a pity, but it would be forgiven.

  At the bottom of the page were the signatures of those who had authorized the action, including the Prime Minister and C.

  Crocker flipped the folder shut with one hand, dropped it back onto Weldon’s spotless desk with a frown.

  The Deputy Chief folded his hands across his broad middle. He wasn’t so much an overweight man as a stocky one, built like the support column one found in underground car parks, with the addition of a liberal head of graying brown hair. Neither of them made enough to afford the tailors that men like C did, and Weldon, like Crocker, purchased his suits at Marks & Spencer. Unlike Crocker, who stayed religiously in the black, blue, and gray spectrum, Weldon went more to the browns.

  “Directive came down this morning, as you can see. You’re to undertake the operation immediately.”

  “I’m not going to send a Minder into Saudi.”

  “I repeat, Paul, you’re to undertake the operation immediately. According to D-Int, Faud is at his home in Jeddah. Poole can take him there.”

  Crocker shook his head. “I’m not putting a Minder into Saudi to perform an assassination. I’d never get him out again.”

  “With proper planning—”

  “It’s Saudi Arabia, not Croydon, sir. Travel in the country is restricted, even to nationals. We’d have to give the Minder cover that would not only get them into the country, but get them from Riyadh to Jeddah, and then out again.”

  “There are other routes out of the country.”

  “To where? He’s supposed to take a boat across the Red Sea into Sudan or Egypt? Or do you think he should tab overland to the UAE, maybe to Jordan? There are too many things that could go wrong.”

  Weldon’s hands slipped down, then came up again to rest on the desk, now in the form of fists. “Your job is to undertake and execute a successful mission, that’s all.”

  “Safe egress is part of a successful mission.”

  “Not a vital part.”

  “I beg to differ with you, sir, but if you’ll direct your attention to the concept of operations, we’ve been directed to conceal the origin of issuing body. Poole dead in Jeddah becomes a very big clue as to who is responsible, don’t you think?”

  “Not if his cover holds.”

  “It won’t hold after he’s dead, not if they know he’s the one who pulled the trigger. They’ll go over his movements with a microscope, and eventually they’ll find their way back to us.”

  Weldon’s fists tightened, then relaxed.

  “It’s academic, anyway,” Crocker continued. “Egress isn’t the problem. Travel restrictions in Saudi are so tight there’s a good chance whichever Minder we put into the country would never make it to target in the first place. And since I’ve only got three of them, I’d rather we get it right the first time.”

  �
��It’s been two weeks since the attacks, Paul, and the Government is impatient. C won’t suffer you dragging your feet.”

  Crocker glared at Weldon, biting back his immediate urge to snap a response.

  “The clock is running,” Weldon added unnecessarily.

  “I will not initiate an operation that’s been half-planned solely to appease C,” Crocker said. “And begging your pardon, sir, but neither should you. You should be defending me on this, not urging me forward.”

  “C is of the opinion that you coddle the Minders. Stalling on this will not help alter that.”

  “They are not coddled.” Crocker didn’t bother to hide the acid in his voice. “The mere fact that I’ve lost two of them in the past eighteen months should make that perfectly plain. I have three Special Operations Officers, sir, three highly trained, highly committed agents, and any one of them, from Lankford to Chace, would march straight to Jeddah right now if that’s what I ordered. They all know their job.”

  “But do you know yours, Paul?”

  “I’ll see that the mission is completed.”

  “See that you do.” Weldon pushed the folder toward Crocker, then sat back in his chair.

  “And to hell with the Minder who falls in the process,” Crocker muttered, and taking the folder, departed the Deputy Chief’s office for the safer confines of the sixth floor.

  9

  London—Vauxhall Cross, “the Pit”

  17 August 1139 GMT

  Chace was eating a sandwich and reading about surplus grain production in Shanxi Province, China, when the black phone on her desk started beeping for her attention. Lankford, at his desk across from her, immediately stopped what he was doing to watch her answer, then reluctantly turned his attention back to the paperwork before him as he realized it wasn’t the red circuit that had rung.