Ultimatum Read Online Free PDF Page B

again and they saw the Colonel standing in the entrance. With fingers to his lips he signalled silence, while the hand holding the 9mm Stetchkin beckoned them. Worried and mystified, Captain Azhari ordered the lieutenants to go to the Colonel at once. Azhari then took cover behind a truck, some fifty metres from the door. Pistol in hand, he kept a sharp lookout .
    The Colonel was still visible, standing outside the door with his back to the shed. He was stooping as if to be less conspicuous, apparently watching something to his right. Major Aramoun was out of sight.
    While Azhari watched, the two lieutenants reached the door. The Colonel moved to the right, the lieutenants followed, and all three passed out of the captain’s field of vision.
    Puzzled and tense, Azhari waited. Suddenly, and with disturbing clarity, he heard the sounds of a struggle, thumps and a sharp cry, quickly muffled. Moments later men came pouring through the door into the warehouse. Azhari fired three shots and saw a man fall. The Syrian ran round to the front of the truck and jumped into the driving cab. He made frantic efforts to start the engine, hoping in his moment of terror to get the engine going and crash the truck through the closed doors of the shed. But it was a forlorn hope. The intruders were already banging at the doors of the Benz cab. In desperation he put his hand on the horn button but nothing happened, and he realized he’d not switched on. He turned the key as a man smashed the window next to him. Azhari saw the menacing barrel of an automatic pistol, shrank away, lifting his weapon in a futile gesture of defence.As he did so, he was acutely aware of two things: the automatic pointing at him was fitted with a silencer, and a spurt of flame was coming from its barrel.
     
    Not long after Ka’ed and his men had killed Azhari, a black Benz six-wheeler was driven up the ramp into the shed through the now open doors. On either side of the cab it was lettered in white D. B. MAHROUTTI BROS , beneath that in smaller letters, ‘Agricultural Machinery’. With the aid of a fork-lift truck, two grey packing cases were taken from the new arrival and substituted for two in the trucks already there: one from each of them. These were among the smaller packing cases which had been transported by the Byblos from Marseille to Beirut, but they were identical in size, colour and markings to those just brought into the shed.
    The substitution complete, the bearded man with the scarred neck – lately galley-hand in the Byblos – climbed back into the driving seat of the Benz. One of Ka’ed’s men joined him. The Benz moved ponderously out of the shed and down the ramp. The bearded man steered it across the railway lines and along the service road to the junction with the main road. There it turned right and rumbled down towards the dock gates.
    Ka’ed and his men dragged the dead bodies of Major Aramoun and the lieutenants back into the shed, took the Walther automatic with spare magazines from the body of Abu Ali, placed papers in his jacket and hung an identity disc about his neck. With his combat knife Ka’ed slashed the dead man’s face beyond recognition. He wept as he did so for they were old friends and Abu Ali had been one of his first recruits. When he’d finished, his men shut and locked the doors and with them he disappeared into the night.
     
    Colonel Rashid Dahan’s body was discovered by a dock labourer soon after eight o’clock in the morning. The policewere at once called. There was no ready means of identifying the body which had been stripped of clothing but for its underpants. It was taken to the mortuary and examined by a forensic surgeon who pronounced death to be due to multiple stab wounds. The police assumed the motive for the murder to have been robbery.
    At that stage, owing to the secrecy which had surrounded the movements of the Syrian officers and the Benz trucks, no thought was given to any connection between