The Fanatics of Al Asad Read online

  The National Security Director answered him.

  "AXE," he said, looking at David Hawk. "It's their kind of work."

  Hawk didn't let a flicker of emotion show on his face. He merely nodded his acknowledgement.

  "How many men will you need for this assignment?" Senator Connors asked.

  Hawk gestured at me with the butt of his chewed cigar.

  "One," he said. "Nick Carter."

  Each face around that table took on a different expression of surprise.

  "One?" repeated the Senator in amazement.

  Hawk got to his feet. So did I.

  "He's enough, Senator. That's why he's Killmaster N3."

  Hawk touched me on the arm.

  "Let's go, Nick," he said. "You heard the man. Time's getting short."

  Chapter Two

  Wednesday. 11:02 p.m. The Mayflower Hotel.

  Her name was Tamar. She sat in the living room of my suite at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, her long, slim legs crossed demurely. Her hair was cut short in a boyish fashion, framing an oval face with the most beautiful doe eyes I had seen in years. The face said youth; the eyes said maturity.

  When I had gotten the call from Hawk to expect a Shin Beth agent the Israelis were sending over, I hadn't expected anyone like this. Certainly not a girl; definitely not one as beautiful as this Sabra.

  "Tamar." I repeated the name. "What's your last name?"

  "It makes no difference," she said with a slight, impatient shrug of her shoulders. "I have many. Do you need one?"

  "Why did they send you? What kind of help do they think you can give me?"

  Unruffled, Tamar took a cigarette from her purse and lit it.

  "This morning," she said, in a soft voice, "I was in Damascus, where I have spent the last two years infiltrating a Palestinian revolutionary group. I have an extensive knowledge of the complexities of the various Palestinian organizations, the countless splinter groups, and how they are interrelated. I speak fluent Arabic. The Arabs do not know that I am Israeli — they'd kill me if they even suspected it, of course. General Ben-Chaim had me catch a plane to Athens. I was flown here by supersonic military jet. Does that answer your question?"

  "How much of the background do you know?"

  "I was briefed on most of it on the way. However, I must say I have never heard of 'Al Asad.' It's a new group."

  I settled back in the armchair on my side of the room and lit one of my own, special gold-tipped cigarettes.

  "Tell me about these splinter groups."

  Tamar began her lecture. "In brief, we can forget about most of the Palestinian organizations and concentrate on Al Fatah, which is the largest and certainly the most important of the fedayeen organizations. Al Fatah was formed by a small group of Gaza Strip Palestinians during the 1950s. The name 'Fatah' — by the way — means 'conquest' in Arabic. The Palestinian Liberation Movement is 'Harakat at-Tahrir al-Filistani.' Reverse the first letters of each word and you have the acronym, Fatah."

  "Are you saying that Al Fatah is behind the assassination and kidnapping?"

  She shook her head. "No, I'm not. It's probably one of the ultra-violent splinter groups that broke off from Al Fatah. It was a group similar to this that I'd been infiltrating in Damascus. They are small, but dangerous because there is no way to control or even influence them."

  "Your ambassador said at our meeting that he felt the Russians somehow had a hand in all this. What did he mean by that?"

  "Well," said Tamar reflectively, "as you may know, as far back as 1970, the KGB began to smuggle arms to the PLO guerrillas. We learned of the activity immediately but no one would believe us. By September of 1973, the facts became so widespread that even The New York Times had an article that quoted Palestinian guerrilla sources as saying the Russians had supplied arms to Al Fatah directly and openly! This was just two weeks after the Black September group of Al Fatah murdered eleven Israeli athletes in the Olympics at Munich!

  "Furthermore, the GRU — Soviet Military Intelligence — brought more than thirty Palestinians to Russia to train them in guerrilla warfare. I'm certain the Soviets had a hand in training your 'Al Asad' terrorists!"

  It was hard for me to concentrate on what she was saying. My eyes kept taking in her slim figure and full breasts under the thin jersey blouse she wore. Tamar was completely unselfconscious about her body or the sexuality she exuded.

  "Assassination training — or guerrilla warfare training?"

  Tamar thought for a moment. "Both, I think," she replied.

  I thought about that for a moment and then went to the telephone. My suite at the Mayflower is special. It's not only reserved for me alone, but it has direct, clean lines to AXE, to the Pentagon and to the FBI. The rooms are electronically swept twice a day. The telephone has a scrambler system.

  The first call I made was to the CIA. Ever since Hawk and I had left the meeting, there had been a CIA agent assigned to stand by that telephone. It was picked up immediately.

  "Vladimir Petrovich Selyutin," I said. "He's a member of Department V, as in Victor, of the KGB. I want to know if he's in the United States. Shall I hold on — or do you want to call me back?"

  He said I could hold on. He'd have the information for me in a minute or two.

  Department V is the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. It's the "executive action" department. While most of the KGB has moved its offices from 2 Dzerzhinsky Square to a new building on a highway just outside the city limits of Moscow, Department V is still quartered in the old building.

  There are a lot of bureaucratic names for killing. Somehow, they all hate to use the word assassination. "Executive action" is one term. The Russian phrase is "mokrie dela." A "wet affair." Wet affairs come in under Department V.

  Vladimir Petrovich Selyutin was a KGB assassin. One of the best they had. We knew him and what he'd done but we could never pin anything on him.

  The new boss of Department V, the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, is a heavy-set Georgian named Mikhael Yelisovich Kalugin, who looks like an overweight Rotarian from the mid-west. He wears rumpled suits, horn-rimmed glasses and an almost perpetual smile on his round face. He blinks out at you from behind the thick lenses and his lips are so wide that they look like a frog. Ever have a genial frog smiling at you? That's Kalugin. He issues the orders to kill.

  And Selyutin reports directly to Kalugin.

  The CIA agent came back on the line and reported that Selyutin was in this country.

  "I want him picked up immediately" I ordered. "If you know where he is, I want to be talking to him in the next hour, understand?"

  He did. I hung up, knowing that I'd soon be face to face with Tovarich Selyutin within the next hour if he were anywhere within several hundred miles of us.

  * * *

  I put the miniature Panasonic tape recorder on the table beside Tamar, slipping the cassette into the recessed chamber.

  "I want you to listen to this," I said, and pressed the PLAY button.

  "What is the name of your organization?" My voice came through the small speaker loud and clear.

  "Ta…" said Ahmad's voice. "…Sin… Mim…"

  We heard Hawk's voice and then mine and then Ahmad's again.

  "Su… Surah…" he said.

  I played the rest of the recording through for her. When it was done, I snapped off the machine.

  "Well, what do you think it means?" I asked.

  Tamar's brow wrinkled in thought. She tapped a fingernail against her teeth.

  "I think…" she began, and then nodded. "Yes, I'm sure of it. The Surah refers to the Qur'an, as you know."

  "What about the rest of what he said?"

  "Ta… Sin… Mim… They're letters of the Arabic alphabet. Almost all of the Surahs of the Qur'an are labelled with one or more letters. Almost like chapter titles."

  "Do you know which one this refers to?"

  Tamar nodded. "Yes. I've memorized the Qur'an. Old fashioned Moslem women aren't suppose
d to be literate. I'm the new breed — the emancipated Arab woman. That's why I was accepted by the troup in Damascus."

  "Then what chapter is it? What does it mean?" I asked impatiently.

  "The Twenty-eighth Surah," Tamar said. "It's called The Story.' It's about Moses and Joseph."

  "What has that got to do with this group?" I was irritated. I spoke Arabic, and I knew much of the Qur'an but I had never memorized it. Neither had most native Arabs.

  "Let me think a minute," said Tamar. She closed her eyes. Her lips moved soundlessly. She was mentally reciting the Qur'an. Finally, she opened her eyes.

  "It's verses eighty-five and eighty-six," she said. "A rough translation would be, 'Allah who gave you the Qur'an shall restore you to your homeland.'"

  I could see that that phrase could be the rallying cry of any Palestinian group. The word from the Prophet Mohammed that Allah himself had promised their return and take-over of all of Palestine.

  The telephone rang. The CIA agent was on the other end. "We've got your man," he said. "The FBI picked him up in New York. They're on their way down to Washington with him right now. By the time you get here, he'll be on tap for you to question him."

  By "here" I knew he meant a CIA safe house in Virginia. It was a perfect place to question a man and not have to worry about cleaning up the mess afterwards.

  * * *

  Thursday. 12:08 a.m. Near Maclean, Virginia.

  Vladimir Petrovich Selyutin was a pale-faced, slender man in his middle thirties. Looking at him, at his broad forehead, his slim, straight nose and delicately boned chin, with his hair brushed straight back, you'd never have thought him capable of violence. He looked like a musician — a violinist, perhaps, or a flutist. His slender, long-fingered hands were delicate. Even his eyes had a poetic, compassionate quality in them.

  We were alone in the room. The room was soundproofed. I leaned my back against the wall and said, "Hello, Vladimir Petrovich."

  Vladimir sat erect in the only chair in the room, a straight-backed, hard, wooden chair bolted to the floor.

  "My name is Arthur…"

  I stopped him.

  "Don't lie, Vladimir Petrovich. This time your arrest is not official. Well play by my rules. You're Vladimir Petrovich Selyutin, a member of Department V of the KGB and you're a very capable assassin. Someday, in the line of duty, I may have to kill you. I don't want to do that now. I want information from you. That's all."

  Vladimir smiled gently at me.

  "That is the truth?"

  I nodded.

  "No beatings first? No torture? No truth drugs?"

  "Do you want me to use them?"

  Vladimir shook his head. "No. Certainly not. What land of information do you want from me?" He cocked his head, looking shrewdly at me.

  I knew that he was prepared to tell me a certain amount. Beyond that, beyond the line where he would consider himself a traitor to his country, he would not talk no matter how much we tortured him.

  "You know what happened yesterday?" I asked him.

  "Those crazy Arabs," he muttered, shaking his head.

  "Yeah, those crazy Arabs. They were Russian trained, weren't they?"

  Cautiously, Selyutin nodded his head. "Yes," he said. "You could say that."

  "By your department?"

  He smiled at me. "Which department is that?"

  "Department V, as in Victor," I repeated. "First Chief Directorate of the KGB. Mikhail Yelisovich Kalugin is your boss."

  "Oh," said Selyutin. "So you know about us."

  "I know about you, too, so kindly stop the cat and mouse game. I want answers!"

  "Yes, we trained some of them," Selyutin admitted reluctantly.

  "You, personally?"

  "No," he said. "Except for one man, I wasn't involved. I knew about the activity, however. It was about two years ago."

  "They were trained in assassination techniques?"

  "Yes." He hesitated and then said, "They have done a stupid thing. To kill the President and the Vice-President of the United States could lead to an atomic war between our countries. I was opposed to the whole idea from the beginning. I could not say much, though. To me, terrorists are too hot-headed. Especially this group. One cannot control them. Kalugin thought differently. I think…" He smiled, a deadly, executioner's smile. "I think that Kalugin will pay for his mistake. He'll be lucky if they kill him. I, myself, would prefer death to life imprisonment in a camp in Siberia."

  "Selyutin," I said, "using a mortar is not a usual assassination technique, is it?"

  "No," he answered.

  "Then there was another department involved?"

  "Yes."

  "Which?"

  "Not one of ours," Vladimir Petrovich replied quickly. "We had them for a few days only. Then the GBU took over."

  The GBU competes with the KGB. GRU — "Glavnoye Razvedynoye Upravleniye." It's the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff, and it's completely separate from the KGB. Its field is anything military.

  "So it was the GBU that trained them in guerrilla warfare tactics, including how to use mortars?"

  "Yes, you could say that."

  "Did you know any of the men in this Al Asad terrorist group?"

  Selyutin shook his head. "As I said, I was not involved — except for one man. He was the only one I worked with. I tell you this, my friend, he is a dangerous man. He's one of the best I have ever come across. There was really very little that I could teach him."

  He paused and smiled, a sad, rueful twist of his lips. "He likes to kill. He enjoys it intensely. To him, it is better than sex. If you ever come across him, be careful. His name is Yousef Khatib."

  "What else, Vladimir Petrovich?"

  "Nothing — from me. But, I am puzzled, gospodin. Why do you not talk with Poganov?"

  "Poganov?"

  "Poganov. Andrei Vasilovich Poganov. He is the one who trained them."

  I laughed. "Selyutin," I asked "do you think I can get into the USSB to interview him?"

  Selyutin stared at me in disbelief. Then he, too, began to laugh.

  "Tovarich, our countries are not so dissimilar after all. One government agency keeps secrets from the next! Lieutenant-Colonel Andrei Vasilovich Poganov, formerly of the GBU, defected to the United States last year. Your CIA 'buried' him somewhere in this country under an assumed name and identity. Ask your CIA where he is!"

  I began to understand something else, too.

  "And the reason you are in this country is to find Poganov?"

  Selyutin made no answer.

  "And to kill him?" I added.

  Selyutin's face was a frozen mask, revealing nothing.

  "Go home," I said tiredly. "Go back to Russia. Your mission's blown."

  "You are very generous," Selyutin replied. "In our country, were you in my place, we would not let you go. We would kill you."

  I didn't tell him that that's exactly what would happen to him before he left the safe house grounds. But, then, there's no sense in making a man suffer unnecessarily.

  Out loud, I said, "Poganov. Andrei Vasilovich Poganov. He would know about the terrorists?"

  "Yes," said Selyutin. "Poganov would certainly know about them."

  Chapter Three

  Thursday. 12:47 a.m. Near Maclean, Virginia.

  I left Selyutin in the interrogation room. Jonas Warren was waiting for me outside the door. I was madder than hell. I should have been informed about Poganov's defection when it occurred. I'm the guy out in the field whose neck is on the line to be chopped off. You think the Russians take the defection of a key man like Poganov lightly? No way! Not a GRU officer with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel! One of our side is going to "defect" willingly of unwillingly to even the score. I knew that David Hawk hadn't been told either or he'd have let me know. The damned CIA had played the affair too close to their vests. Interservice rivalry may have its place in the scheme of things. Here it had caused us a six- to eight-hour delay and there hadn
't been that much time to start with.

  "Well?" asked Warren.

  "Where's Poganov?" I demanded.

  He tried to evade my question.

  "What's Poganov got to do with this?" He didn't deny knowing about Poganov, I noticed.

  "Damn it, I want to know where Poganov is right now! I want to talk to him!"

  "I'll have to clear it with the top brass," said Warren nervously. He was a nice, Ivy League type who really didn't belong in the type of work we were in. Administration, not field work, was his forte.

  I spun around on him.

  "You'll clear it with no one!" I snapped at him. "Right now, you get your ass in gear and get me the files on Poganov. Then you make arrangements to get me to him in the shortest possible time! You understand that?"

  "I'm really not sure…"

  "Oh, for crissake!"

  I walked into the nearest room and picked up a telephone. I dialed an outside line and then the AXE number and got to Hawk immediately. Briefly, I explained the situation to him.

  "They're supposed to be cooperating," I said angrily. "I've got a low-level flunky without authority as coordinating officer. I want someone who can say 'frog' and have everyone within earshot jump as high as he can!"

  Hawk calmed me down.

  "Just be in Conference Room B at the Pentagon," he said. He told me the wing and the floor. "By the time you get there, you'll have the man you want."

  I hung up and walked outside. Jonas Warren trotted beside me like a puppy eager to please but not knowing which master he was responsible to.

  The CIA agency staff car was waiting for me outside. Still too angry to talk to Warren, I got in and told the driver where I wanted to go. Warren was still trying to placate me when we took off.

  Hawk was right. By the time I got to the conference room, there was both a senior CIA official who'd been routed out of bed, and a Brigadier-General from the Air Force waiting for me. General Snowden was liaison with the National Security Agency. I couldn't have had a better man.

  Harry Carpentier was the CIA official.

  "Here's the dossier on Poganov," Carpentier said as I came into the room. "Sorry you ran into difficulty down in Maclean."