第 10 页

?There are parts of this that make me squirm,? said Moir, tapping his copy.

?Me too,? said Salkind. ?The last four pages. Do we have to go that far　

?Gentlemen, friends,? rumbled Miller. ?I fully appre-ciate your concern, your aversion even. I ask you only to consider the stakes. Not only we but all America stands in mortal peril. You have seen the terms proposed by the Judas in the White House to strip our land of its defenses and to propitiate the Antichrist in Moscow. That man must go be-fore he destroys this our beloved country and brings us all to ruin. You especially, who now face bankruptcy. And I am assured by Mr. Moss here that, regarding the last few pages, it will never come to that. Cormack will go before that is necessary.?

Irving Moss sat in a white suit at the end of the table, silent. There were parts of his plan that he had not put in the report, things he could mention only in privacy to Miller. He breathed through his mouth to avoid the low whistling caused by his damaged nose.

Miller suddenly startled them all. ?Friends, let us seek the guidance of Him who understands all things. Let us pray together.?

Ben Salkind shot a rapid glance at Peter Cobb, who raised his eyebrows. Melville Scanlon?s face was expression-less. Cyrus Miller placed both hands flat on the table, closed his eyes, and raised his face to the ceiling. He was not a man for bowing his head, even when addressing the Almighty. They were, after all, close confidants.

?Lord,? intoned the oil tycoon, ?hear us, we pray You. Hear us true and loyal sons of this glorious land, which is of Your creation and which You have vouchsafed to our safekeeping. Guide our hands. Uphold our hearts. Teach us to have the courage to go through with the task that lies before us and which, we are sure, has Your blessing. Help us to save this, Your chosen country, and these, Your chosen people.?

He went on in this vein for several minutes, then was silent for several more. When he lowered his face and sur-veyed the five men with him, his eyes burned with the con-viction of those who truly have no doubt.

?Gentlemen, He has spoken. He is with us in our en-deavors. We must go forward, not back, for our country and our God.?

The other five had little choice but to nod their assent. An hour later Irving Moss talked privately with Miller in his study. There were, he made plain, two components that were vital but which he, Moss, could not arrange. One was a piece of high-complexity Soviet technology; the other was a secret source within the innermost councils of the White House. He explained why. Miller nodded thoughtfully.

?I will see to both,? he said. ?You have your budget and the down payment on your fee. Proceed with the plan with-out delay.?

?

June

Colonel Easterhouse was received by Miller in the first week of June. He had been busy in Saudi Arabia but the summons was unequivocal, so he flew from Jiddah to New York via London and connected straight to Houston. A car met him on schedule, drove him to the private William P. Hobby Airport southeast of the city, and the Learjet brought him to the ranch, which he had not seen before. His progress report was optimistic and well received.

He was able to say that his go-between in the Religious Police had been enthusiastic when approached with the no-tion of a change of government in Riyadh, and had made contact with the fugitive Imam of the Shi?ah Fundamentalists when the man?s secret hiding place had been revealed to him by Easterhouse. The fact that the Imam had not been be-trayed proved that the Religious Police zealot was trustwor-thy.

The Imam had heard out the proposal?made to him on a no-name basis, since he would never have accepted that a Christian like Easterhouse should become an instrument of Allah?s will?and was reported to be equally enthusiastic.

?The point is, Mr. Miller, the Hezb?Allah fanatics have so far not attempted to seize the obvious plum of Saudi Ara-bia, preferring to try to defeat and annex Iraq first, in which they have failed. The reason for their patience is that they feared, rightly, that seeking to topple the House of Sa?ud would provoke a fierce reaction from the hitherto vacillating U.S.A. They have always believed Saudi Arabia would fall to them at the right moment. The Imam appears to accept that next spring?the Diamond Jubilee jamboree is now defi-nitely slated for April?will be Allah?s choice of the right moment.?

During the jamboree, huge delegations from all the thirty-seven major tribes of the country would converge on Riyadh to pay homage to the royal house. Among these would be the tribes from the Hasa region, the oil-field work-ers who were mainly of the Shi?ah sect. Hidden in their midst would be the two hundred chosen assassins of the Imam, unarmed until their submachine carbines and ammu-nition, covertly imported in one of Scanlon?s tankers, had been distributed among them.

Easterhouse was finally able to report that a senior Egyptian officer?the Egyptian Military Adviser Group played a crucial role at all technical levels of the Saudi Army?had agreed that if his country, with its teeming mil-lions and shortage of money, was given access to Saudi oil after the coup, he would ensure the reissue of defective am-munition to the Royal Guard, who would then be helpless to defend their masters. Miller nodded thoughtfully.

?You have done well, Colonel,? he said, then changed the subject. ?Tell me, what would Soviet reaction be to this American takeover of Saudi Arabia　

?Extreme perturbation, I would imagine,? said the colonel.

?Enough to put an end to the Nantucket Treaty, of which we now know the full terms　 asked Miller.

?I would have thought so,? said Easterhouse.

?Which group inside the Soviet Union would have most reason to dislike the treaty and all its terms, and wish to see it destroyed　

?The General Staff,? said the colonel without hesita-tion. ?Their position in the U.S.S.R. is like that of our Joint Chiefs of Staff and the defense industry rolled into one. The treaty will cut their power, their prestige, their budget, and their numbers by forty percent. I can?t see them welcoming that.?

?Strange allies,? mused Miller. ?Is there any way of getting in discreet contact　

?I ... have certain acquaintances,? said Easterhouse carefully.

?I want you to use them,? said Miller. ?Just say there are powerful interests in the U.S. A. who view the Nantucket Treaty with as little favor as they, and believe it might be aborted from the American end, and would like to confer.?

?

The kingdom of Jordan is not particularly pro-Soviet, but King Hussein has long had to tread a delicate path to stay on his throne in Amman, and has occasionally bought Soviet weaponry, though his Hashemite Arab Legion is mainly Western-armed. Still, there exists a thirty-man Soviet Mili-tary Advisory Team in Amman, headed by the defenseat-tach? at the Russian embassy. Easterhouse, once attending the desert testing of some Soviet hardware east of Aqaba on behalf of his Saudi patrons, had met the man. Passing through Amman on his way back, Easterhouse stopped over.

The defenseattach?, Colonel Kutuzov, whom Eas-terhouse was convinced was from the GRU, was still in place and they had a private dinner. The American was stunned by the speed of the reaction. Two weeks later he was contacted in Riyadh to be told that certain gentlemen would be happy to meet his ?friends? in circumstances of great discretion. A fat package of travel instructions was given to him, which he couriered unopened to Houston.

?

July

Of all the Communist countries, Yugoslavia is the most relaxed in the matter of tourism, so much so that entry visas may be acquired with little formality right on arrival at Bel-grade airport. In mid-July five men flew into Belgrade on the same day but from different directions and on different flights. They came by scheduled airlines out of Amsterdam, Rome, Vienna, London, and Frankfurt. As all were Ameri-can passport holders, none had needed visas for any of those cities either. All applied for and received visas at Belgrade for a week?s harmless tourism?one in the mid-morning, two in the lunch hour and two in the afternoon. All told the inter-viewing visa officers they had come to hunt boar and stag from the famous Karadjordjevo hunting lodge, a converted fortress on the Danube much favored by wealthy Westerners. Each of the five claimed, as he was issued his visa, that en route to the hunting lodge he would be spending one night at the super-luxury Hotel Petrovaradin at Novi Sad, eighty kilo-meters northwest of Belgrade. And each took a taxi to that hotel.

The visa officers? shift changed in the lunch hour, so only one came under the eye of Officer Pavlic, who hap-pened to be a covert asset in the pay of the Soviet KGB. Two hours after Pavlic checked off duty, a routine report from him arrived on the desk of the Soviet rezident in his office at the embassy in central Belgrade.

Pavel Kerkorian was not at his best; he had had a late night?not entirely in the course of duty but his wife was fat and constantly complaining, while he found some of these flaxen Bosnian girls irresistible?and a heavy lunch, defi-nitely in the course of duty, with a hard-drinking member of the Yugoslav Central Committee whom he hoped to recruit. He almost put Pavlic?sreport on one side. Americans were pouring into Yugoslavia nowadays?to check them all out would be impossible. But there was something about the name. Not the surname?that was common enough?but where had he seen the first name Cyrus before?

He found it again an hour later right in his office; a back number of Forbes magazine had carried an article on Cyrus V. Miller. By such flukes are destinies sometimes decided. It did not make sense, and the wiry Armenian KGB major liked things to make sense. Why would a man of nearly eighty, known to be pathologically anti-Communist, come hunting boar in Yugoslavia by scheduled airlines when he was rich enough to hunt anything he wanted in North Amer-ica and travel by private jet? He summoned two of his staff, youngsters fresh in from Moscow, and hoped they wouldn?t make a mess of it. (As he had remarked to his CIA opposite number at a cocktail party recently, you just can?t get good help nowadays. The CIA man had agreed completely.)

Kerkorian?s young agents spoke Serbo-Croatian, but he still advised them to rely on their driver, a Yugoslav who knew his way around. They checked back that evening from a phone booth in the Petrovaradin Hotel, which made the major spit because the Yugoslavs certainly had it tapped. He told them to go somewhere else.

He was just about to go home when they checked in again, this time from a humble inn a few miles from Novi Sad. There was not one American, but five, they said. They might have met at the hotel, but seemed to know each other. Money had changed hands at the reception desk and they had copies of the first three pages of each American?s passport. The five were due to be picked up in the morning in a mini-bus and taken to some hunting lodge, said the gumshoes, and what should we do now?

?Stay there,? said Kerkorian. ?Yes, all night. I want to know where they go and whom they see.?

Serve them right, he thought as he went home. These youngsters have it too easy nowadays. It was probably noth-ing, but it would give the sprogs a bit of experience.

At noon the next day they were back, tired, unshaven, but triumphant. What they had to say left Kerkorian stunned. A mini-van had duly arrived and taken the five Americans on board. The guide was in plain clothes but looked decidedly military?and Russian. Instead of heading for the hunting lodge, the bus had taken the five Americans back toward Bel-grade, then ducked straight into Batajnica Air Base. They had not shown their passports at the main gate?the guide had produced five passes from his own inside pocket and got them through the barrier.

Kerkorian knew Batajnica; it was a big Yugoslav air base twenty kilometers northwest of Belgrade, definitely not on the sightseeing schedule of American tourists. Among other things it hosted a constant stream of Soviet military transports bringing inresupplies for the enormous Soviet Military Adviser Group in Yugoslavia. That meant there was a team of Russian engineers inside the base, and one of them worked for him. The man was in cargo control. Ten hours later Kerkorian sent a ?blitz? report to Yazenevo, headquar-ters of the KGB?s First Chief Directorate, the external espio-nage arm. It went directly to the desk of the Deputy Head of the FCD, General Vadim Kirpichenko, who made a number of inquiries internal to the U.S.S.R. and sent an expanded report right up to his chairman, General Kryuchkov.

What Kerkorian had reported was that the five Ameri-cans had all been escorted straight from the minibus into an Antonov 42 jet transport which had just arrived with cargo from Odessa and at once headed back there. A later report from the Belgrade rezident announced that the Americans had returned the same way twenty-four hours later, spent a second night at the Petrovaradin Hotel, and then left Yugo-slavia altogether, without hunting a single boar. Kerkorian was commended for his vigilance.

?

August

The heat hung over the Costa del Sol like a blanket. Down on the beaches the million tourists were turning themselves over and over like steaks on a griddle, oiling and basting cou-rageously as they tried to acquire a deep mahogany tan in their two precious weeks and too often simply achieving lobster-red. The sky was such a pale blue it was almost white, and even the usual breeze off the sea had sagged to a zephyr.

To the west the great molar of the Rock of Gibraltar jutted into the heat haze, shimmering at its range of fifteen miles; the pale slopes of the concrete rain-catchment system built by the Royal Engineers to feed the underground cisterns stuck out like a leprous scar on the flank of the rock.

In the hills behindCasares beach the air was a mite cooler but not much; relief really came only at dawn and just before sunset, so the vineyard workers ofAlc?ntara del Rio were rising at four in the morning to put in six hours before the sun drove them into the shade. After lunch they would snooze through the traditional Spanish siesta behind their thick, cool, lime-washed walls until five, then put in more labor till the light faded around eight.

Under the sun the grapes ripened and became fat. The harvest would not come yet, but it would be good this year. In his bar Antonio brought the carafe of wine to the foreigner as usual and beamed.

　 Sera bien, la cosecha　he asked.

?Yes,? said the tall man with a smile. ?This year the harvest will be very good. We shall all be able to pay our bar bills.?

Antonio roared with laughter. Everyone knew the for-eigner owned his own land outright and always paid cash on the spot.

?

Two weeks later Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was in no mood to joke. Though often a genial man, with a reputation for a good sense of humor and a light touch with subordi-nates, he could also show a hair-trigger temper, as when preached at by Westerners over civil rights issues or when he felt badly let down by a subordinate. He sat at his desk on the seventh and top floor of the Central Committee Building in Novaya Ploshchad and stared angrily at the reports spread all over the table.