Tracks (38 page)

“This is an Indian facility,”
the lieutenant insisted. “There are no foreigners here, Miss.”

“Get the base commander,” Ali
pitched in. “He’s got to know.”

“But he’s asleep,” the
sergeant said in horror. 

“This is an emergency!” 
Mai-Li pleaded.  “Why else would two women be here in the middle of the
night for God’s sake?”

The three moved away to
converse.  Finally the lieutenant walked briskly away.

Harley showed up with the base
commander ten minutes later, bleary eyed and upset.  He nodded at the
women, reassuring the troubled soldiers, then came walking out.

“This’d better be good as our
cover is now blown!” he whispered menacingly as he moved away from the gate,
guiding the women by their elbows.

“Sam called from Eilat,”
Mai-Li said, straightening her gaze at him.  “They’ve located Jack.”

“
Yes,
and ..?” Harley spit out angrily.

“There’s an opportunity to
spring him before he gets to trial...”

Harley looked at her hard,
trying to comprehend the information.

“We’re hours away from...” he
began saying.

“Sam said to abort,” Mai-Li
interrupted.  “Jack’s more important.”

“But...”

“It’s a one shot deal and Sam
wants you.  If we miss, Jack could be in there for life.”

Harley grabbed his head with
his hands and turned taking a few steps away then abruptly returned.

“He’s got three hundred
thousand to pay you,” Mai-Li blurted out, anticipating his next objection.

Open mouthed, Harley looked at
Ali.

“We can do this some other
time, Joe,” Ali reasoned.

“But
those kids?
I thought it was about them...”

“It is,” Mai-Li put in. 
“Jack’s contributed to saving more of them than anyone I know and he’ll go on
doing it if we can only get him out!”

Harley’s anger suddenly
deflated.  He took a deep breath and pulled the women further from the
gate.

“OK, fill me in,” he
instructed.

“Jack will be moved from the Sharm
el Sheikh Hospital to be tried in Dahab in three days,” Mai-Li clarified. 
“There’s an opportunity to grab him en route.  That’s all Sam was willing
to say.  He said we must get to Israel in the next day or we lose the
opportunity.  There’s an El-Al flight leaving Bombay this afternoon. 
We need to be on it.”

Though he was famous for
keeping a cool head and decisively responding with corrective measures under
fire, Harley was a meticulous planner who hated makeshift operations.  It
was his recipe for success. 

“This is extremely short
notice,” he complained to the women as they huddled in front of the gate, the
Indian soldiers carefully scrutinizing them. “I don’t know who I need to take
or how we get out there in time.”

“Get them to fly us to Bombay with
military transport,” Mai-Li suggested.

There was a pause. 
Harley shut his eyes in concentration. “I’ll need to talk to the base
commander,” he finally said.   “You girls find out if we can get to
Bombay using commercial transport.  I’ll also need to talk to Sam. 
Can you get me his number?” he addressed Mai-Li.

Impulsively Mai-Li reached up
to embrace Harley by the neck, kissing him on the cheek. 

“We’ll need to call off the
media,” she said as she and Ali sprinted for their taxi waiting nearby.

Harley had his own burden of
explaining to his men, the base commander, the Indian Special Forces, and the
folks back home and he needed to make it stick if they ever wanted another
crack at the Lambda-B organization.  His involvement and all the preparations
had by now made it a personal affair Harley needed to see through.  Money
was always just a means to an end and he was now ready to even do it for
free.  He hated being forced into making a hasty decision, one he feared
could be costly due to lack of appropriate preparation, but he sympathized with
Sam and his loyalty to his people.  They had only one shot, as flimsy as
it may be, at saving Jack, versus a possible second round in Kashmir.  He
would have done the same for one of his men.

*****

Kasuma rented a car in Nueba
and drove to Sharm via Dahab where she made a brief stop to meet a colleague
who confirmed the information she had passed on to Kessler whereby careful and
discreet preparations were being made for a swift trial of the American. 
Hassan, her informant, had been to the now infamous building where Clair had
been held and from which Ortega tragically tried to escape, that housed the
court, the police station, and the jail. 

He had also been to the beach
café where he heard the notorious Abdullah Fuad, attorney at
law,
shoot his mouth off promising vengeance in front of a
crowd of police officers.  He, of course, would support the prosecution
with an incriminating testimony as their star witness.  

Kasuma was on her way to her
most dangerous mission to date.  She had agreed to physically follow the
convoy escorting Jack from Sharm to Dahab and alert the rescue team on its
whereabouts.  Now that they were certain Jack was not going back via the
A-Tur prison, she and Kessler had agreed it would be the only sensible way to
make certain they would be ready in time and strike the right vehicles.
Alternatively, her presence would allow them to make adjustments or even abort
the mission if need be.  Kessler had equipped her with a powerful hand-held
short wave radio, one that could transmit far enough to alert the rescue team
who would be setting the ambush along the coastal road.  The team would be
offloaded by an Israeli vessel in close vicinity to the coast where they would
use small rubber boats for the insertion, an undertaking they planned to
complete before dawn.   The team was to find a way to keep out of
sight within striking distance of the highway at an agreed spot.  Kasuma
would provide continuous reports of progress until it was time to strike.   

She reached Sharm in the
afternoon, checked in at the Hilton and went directly to the hospital where
another acquaintance, an anesthesiologist named
Summer
,
was expecting her.

The hospital was a rectangular
reconstructed two-storey building with an added new wing that housed outpatient
infirmaries, several shops and a cafeteria.    

She found
Summer
in the cafeteria having coffee but before she could approach him, he signaled
for her to stay put, then follow him as he made his way out of the hospital. He
walked briskly toward the Sharm beach promenade, crowded with tourists
clustering the colorful array of shops, restaurants, hotels and casinos along
the half-moon Ofira Bay, the Red Sea waters sparkling in the afternoon
sun.   

Summer walked down to the
beach, took off his shoes and sat, feet immersed in the water.  Kasuma did
the same.  As she sat, she handed him an overstuffed envelope, in it a
bundle of bills of Egyptian currency.   

Summer was the one who had
informed her of the ensuing change of plan.  Initially, he had reported,
they wanted the American out of the hospital and back in prison quickly, but
when they realized he could not be moved for at least a week, nor could he be
treated at an inferior facility such as the A-Tur prison, they opted to keep
him and send him to Dahab, direct. 

“They have him well-guarded
down in the basement,” he informed Kasuma, gazing out toward the bay. 
“Been there since the operation.”

“How’s he doing?” Kasuma
inquired, shielding her eyes with her palm from the intense sun.

“Hasn’t been any unusual
activity so I assume he’s OK,”
Summer
said.  “The
talk is that he’s leaving sometime this week but a firm day hasn’t been
established.”

A dog ran by chasing a stick,
two blonde kids chasing after him, shouting in a foreign language.  It was
a Sunday and she figured Jack would be moved on the Tuesday, Wednesday at the
latest if the trial was to begin this week.  But she had to be precise if
she was to minimize risk for the troops.

“How much advance notice can you
give me?” she questioned.

“Come back tomorrow, same
time, I might know something,”
Summer
said without
commitment.

Kasuma had no choice but to
abide.  She was on extremely shaky ground even with the large bribe money
she had paid.  The entire affair was uncharacteristically hushed and
sources were dreadfully limited.

She reached for her shoes and
left with them in her hand, silently making her way along the water line, the
low waves caressing her bare feet.  She had another person to see for
cross-reference; a second envelope was concealed on her body for that
purpose.    

She walked on the beach along
the bay, converging with the boardwalk after a while, then doubled back and
made her way among the hordes of people toward the
hospital.      

Faisel was a lanky male nurse
who moved like a giraffe among his fellow countrymen who, on average, were a
head shorter than him.  Kasuma had no problem spotting him attending to a
line of patients in the emergency room.  Nurse Faisel did not know her so
she got in line and patiently waited her turn.  When she reached him she
handed him a small note with her name and the name of her referral. 
Faisel looked at the note uncomprehendingly for a brief moment, then took her
by the hand and led her behind a partition.

“You must leave immediately!”
he told her worriedly.  “The place is infested with undercover
police.  Everyone's paranoid.  I’ll need to see you after
work.”  

“When’s that?” Kasuma
inquired.

“Later,
around seven.”

“Where can we meet?”

“Wait for me at the Reef
Café on the boardwalk,” Faisel whispered, taping a bandage around her
arm then leading her back from behind the partition to the waiting crowd. 
Kasuma thanked him, holding her hand for show,
then
slipped out of the building.

Lieutenant Hamoodi, Chief
Halil’s second-in-command, walked nervously back and forth, in front of a
handful of men watching him.

His job was to secure the
transport of the American to the trial in Dahab.  Chief Halil did not
trust his Sharm counterparts and had sent his deputy and most trusted men to
oversee the proceedings and provide escort.   

“Are you sure it’s her?”
Hamoodi was asking one of the four men he had brought along from Dahab.

The undercover police officer
was looking at a photo sent from the border station at Taba of a woman
suspected of being “friendly” with the Israelis.

“Name is Kasuma, a prominent
daughter of Chief Abu-Kadim of the Tarrabin,” the man said with contempt. 
“They’ve suspected her for years.”

“So why haven’t they arrested
her?”

“Preferred to watch her at a
distance, I guess,” the officer observed.  “Maybe she’s more useful this
way.”

“So they think she’s involved
in this?” Hamoodi questioned his team.

“They did not elaborate,”
another officer clarified.  “Said to keep an eye on her but refrain from
making contact.”

“So, do you think she’s
involved in this?”

“Well, if it’s her, then her
presence here is definitely suspicious,” a third officer remarked.

Hamoodi resumed his
pacing.  He was at a loss as to what to do because clearly, if the woman
was involved, he could not ignore her presence, but nor could he imagine the
type of threat she could pose.  Short of kidnapping the American from the
basement or en route to Dahab, there was not much she could do and she would
have to be insane to attempt anything with the level of attention given to the
matter.

It could be pure coincidence.

“Where did you say you spotted
her?” he asked his deputy once again.

“Entering
the emergency room.
  She stood in line for treatment,
then came out with a bandage on her hand but I could have sworn she didn’t seem
to be injured when she came in.”

“Did you notice her hand when
she walked in?” Hamoodi queried.

“Not really.  I focused
on her face, then, from where I was standing, I could only watch her back.”

“Did she approach
anyone?  Talk to anyone?  Do anything peculiar?”

“She stood in line for quite a
while then went behind the podium for her treatment.  The nurse was the
only one she had any contact with.”

Hamoodi mulled the information
over. 

“Where did she go after that?”

“Toward
the beach.
  I didn’t want to leave my post or I
would’ve followed her.”

“Shame.
 
We could have at least found out where she’s staying.”

Hamoodi was thinking of the
nurse.  If anyone could help her, he or she would have to be someone with
information from inside the hospital.  A nurse was definitely a
prospect.  His man did not notice the woman wounded in any way yet she
stood in line for treatment and talked only to the nurse.  If indeed she
was healthy, the nurse was her contact.