Year of the Golden Ape Read online

  Colin Forbes

  Year of the Golden Ape

  Pan Books

  in association with Collins

  For Jane

  First published 1974 by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd

  This edition published 1975 by Pan Book Ltd,

  Cavaye Place, London SW10 9PG

  in association with William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd

  19 18 17 16 IS 14 13 12

  © Colin Forbes 1974

  ISBN 0 330 24627 5

  Made and printed in Great Britain by

  Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  Contents

  Part One: The terrorists

  Part Two: The hi-jack

  Part Three: The San Francisco experience

  Part one The terrorists

  1

  In January two major assassinations took place in the Middle East. The new, thirty-year-old King of Saudi Arabia was murdered as he made love to one of his numerous wives, skewered through the back so savagely as he lay prone that the knife blade penetrated the body of the girl beneath him, piercing her heart. An alleged cousin promptly assumed nominal power and issued a statement that he would not rest until Arab troops patrolled the streets of Jerusalem. The statement reassured everyone east of Suez - it showed that the King's heart was in the right place, that he was bent on the extinction of the State of Israel.

  But the significant figure in this drama was the man who planned it. Sheikh Gamal Tafak immediately took over the posts of Oil and Finance Minister from his predecessor, who with so many other moderates had fled the country for his life. Tafak, a brilliant fanatic, sincerely believed that to recover Palestine for the Arabs, the oil weapon which chance had placed in their hands must be wielded ruthlessly. It was from this moment that the power of the sheikhs was really exerted against the West.

  The oil tap was turned off in January - at the height of a savage European winter - and Tafak himself visited western capitals to inform his nervous hosts that this time, unlike in 1973, there would be no concessions ...

  'The West must no longer support Israel with so much as a glass of water,' he informed European foreign ministers. 'Until this condition is fulfilled we are cutting the flow of oil to Europe and America by fifty per cent. We are declaring a state of blockade...'

  Tafak was in London when the gentle, statesmanlike President of Egypt was assassinated, beaten to death with rifle butts as he slept, by the urgent hammerblows of young soldiers under the direct orders of Colonel Selim Sherif who personally emptied his revolver into the already dying president. Within hours Col Sherif was proclaimed as the new President of Egypt. He reassured the Cairo mob with a speech from a balcony.

  The traitor who sat down with our enemies at the same table is dead. In the West they call us apes - we will now show them the real power of the ape...'

  Sheriff's reference was to an article by an exasperated Washington correspondent who had dubbed certain autocratic sheikhs as 'golden apes, gold piling up in their treasuries while their people still roam the desert. . .' Sherif, a clever propagandist, seized on the phrase and broadened it to include the entire Arab nation.

  What the West had most feared had happened. The moderate Arab leaders who had struggled valiantly to ease their way forward to cooperation with the rest of the world had been swept aside, buried. As so often happens when vast power is there for the taking, the extremists had climbed into the saddle. In London, shortly after Col Sheriffs balcony speech, Sheikh Gamal Tafak made his own speech at a City of London banquet - much to the consternation of his hosts.

  This time there will be no favoured nations as in 1973. The whole of the West must suffer as we are suffering in Palestine -where an alien race oppresses our people, steals their land, turning them into refugees who are stateless persons without a country, without hope...'

  The Year of the Golden Ape had begun...

  2

  By March the new fifty per cent oil cut was squeezing the life out of Europe, America and Japan. The price had climbed to thirty dollars a barrel. Gold, the bellwether of international disaster, was approaching the five hundred dollars an ounce level. And Sheikh Gamal Tafak was flying back to Jeddah from Washington, having told the Americans that he could offer no hope of a respite yet.

  For some people it was a nightmare, for others a dream - the destruction of Israel. For Gamal Tafak, a handsome man with dark hair and a dark fringe of beard, it was a dream close to realisation. In only a few months the Arab armies - under the overall command of Col Sherif - would advance and overwhelm the enemy, occupying his country. The occupation would have to be followed by stern measures - to persuade three million Israelis to leave Palestine for ever.

  The key to Tafak's plan was to immobilise the West at the critical moment, to make it impossible for them to supply fresh arms to Israel when she was on the point of extinction. As he looked down from the jetliner, now passing over the Aegean, Tafak thought how curious it was - that the plan which would make him the most famous Arab of the twentieth century depended at this stage on two Europeans - an Englishman - and a Frenchman...

  Jean Jules LeCat was forty-two years old, a man with a violent past, an unpromising present and a hopeless future. He was intelligent enough to know this, so he was relieved when he was approached secretly by Sheikh Gamal Tafak's right-hand man in Algiers, Ahmed Riad, one week after his unexpected release from the Santé prison in Paris. Riad offered him two hundred thousand dollars to carry out a massacre.

  'The English adventurer, Winter, will nominally be in control of the operation,' Riad explained, 'but you will kill the hostages. We do not think Winter is capable of such detachment...'

  'He is not,' LeCat replied. 'We worked together for two years in the Mediterranean before I was betrayed and ended up in the Santé. I know Winter. He is squeamish . ..'

  To the average person the proposal might have sounded barbaric, but to LeCat it was a highly dangerous operation Riad had proposed and one to be undertaken because the compensation was so high. His violent past made him view the transaction clinically.

  LeCat was the product of a brief liaison between an Arab girl and a French army captain before the Second World War. When the child was born in Constantine, Algeria, LeCat took his son away from the girl who was glad to receive a few hundred francs on condition she never saw the child again. Applying for leave, Jules LeCat, the father, took the baby back to France.

  Its birth was registered in Toulon where LeCat persuaded a girl friend to pretend to be his wife. A cosmopolitan girl, she was amused by the deception - especially as LeCat's estranged wife was at that moment living in Bordeaux. A doctor, apiednoir, was bribed to provide the requisite documentation, and Jean Jules LeCat became a French citizen.

  Brought up by an aunt in Algiers, who was never told the truth - Jules LeCat's real wife conveniently got herself killed in a motor accident shortly after the registration of the birth - the boy went into the Army in 1950 when he was seventeen. His rapid promotion came years later during the ferocious fighting in Algeria when the Arabs were struggling for their independence.

  It was an experience which suited his nature. At twenty-seven he became skilled at locating terrorists, at laying traps for them, at torturing information out of the men he caught. He was quickly promoted to captain, his father's old rank. 'To trap a terrorist you must iearn to think like him' was one
of his favourite sayings. Later, he added a new maxim. 'You must become a terrorist...'

  His father died at the height of the terrible war, and on his deathbed he made a bad mistake. He told Jean Jules the truth about his origins. 'Your mother was an Arab girl out of the Casbah...'

  He got no further because Jean Jules, proud of his French citizenship, despising the men he captured and tortured as no more than animals, slapped the dying man hard with the back of his hand. Jean Jules had been two days without sleep and there was still blood on his jacket from a savage engagement in the hills. When he recovered from the shock of what his father had told him, the old man lay dead. He called the doctor, who signed the death certificate without a second thought; after all, the patient had been dying.

  LeCat became even more savage in his battles with the terrorists; from then on he used his skill as an explosives expert to lace the hillsides with boobytraps. No farm building, no outhouse, not even an animal's drinking trough was safe to touch. His commanding officer was impressed with his subordinate's ferocity.

  'LeCat, you seem determined to kill every Arab in north Africa...'

  'Then, mon colonel, there will be no terrorists left,' LeCat replied.

  When De Gaulle decided to give Algeria independence and the OAS, a secret organisation pledged to keep Algeria French, revolted, LeCat joined it. His maxim, 'You must become a terrorist', came true. He became one. Had there been two dozen men like him in Algeria, De Gaulle might have failed. LeCat turned half Algiers into a minefield, but only half... When the end came he fled to Egypt to survive.

  Speaking fluent Arabic - as well as French and English - LeCat merged with his Egyptian background, changing his name and telling everyone how he had worked against the OAS. He earned a little money - and the friendship of certain Arabs, including a certain Ahmed Riad - by going to Tel Aviv and spying on the Israelis. He also earned a reputation for being a good man to send on a killing party.

  For ten years LeCat drifted, living in the Middle East, in Quebec, in America, engaged in various criminal activities, never staying anywhere so long that he was caught. In 1972 he returned to the Mediterranean where he joined the Englishman, Winter, in smuggling operations. For two years he had a profitable existence, then he was arrested in Marseilles, tried for smuggling and serious assault against the police, sentenced to a long term of imprisonment in the Santé prison in Paris.

  Released later under mysterious circumstances, he came out of prison to be met by an Algerian who provided him with an air ticket to Algiers, a sum of money, and the address of a café where he met Ahmed Riad.

  Riad explained the nature of the vast operation to create an incident which would outrage the West. What Riad did not explain was the ultimate plan whereby Sheikh Gamal Tafak, exploiting the outcry from the West, would persuade every Arab oil producer to cut the oil flow a second time - and this time to zero. Then, with the West hamstrung, the way would be open for the final, annihilating attack on Israel.

  It was in March, in what came to be known as the Year of the Golden Ape, that LeCat put into operation the first part of the plan to create the terrible incident which would appal and out-rage the West. He went about organising the production of a nuclear device.

  On March 10, France, like so many other countries, was half-paralysed by the huge Arab oil cut when Jean-Philippe Antoine, a small, self-contained man of thirty-five, walked confidently along a street in Nantes in western France. Stopping, he glanced up and down the street, then pressed the bell on a dentist's front door. The door opened a few inches, a pair of eyes stared at him. The Frenchman's confidence cracked.

  'For God's sake, let me in ...'

  The pair of eyes disappeared and the door opened wider, just wide enough for him to step inside. Standing in the hallway, Antoine blinked in the gloom. At ten o'clock on a March morning it was still only half-light inside the old house; the lamp had not been turned on as an energy-saving measure. The front door closed behind him, the key turned in the lock. Antoine's lips trembled as he gazed at the short, wide-shouldered man who had let him in.

  'Surely we should hurry?' Antoine demanded. 'Which way do I go?'

  'You are nervous?' LeCat lit a Gitane and for a few seconds Antoine caught sight of his face in the match-flame; a cruel face, hardened by grim experience few men have to endure in their lifetime, a moustache curved down almost to the comers of a wide mouth, the eyes half-closed against the match-flame, eyes which calmly studied Antoine who had not replied. 'Oui, you are nervous, my friend. Go down the hall and through the doorway. The man who is waiting there will take you to the car.'

  'I've changed my mind...' The effort the words caused Antoine made them come out in a near-hysterical rush. 'I can't go on with this thing.'

  'But you have to ...' LeCat blew smoke through his nose. 'You see, they are dead already - in there ...'

  Gesturing towards a half-open door leading off the hall, LeCat gripped Antoine's arm. 'Give me everything in your pockets and then move!' He took the identity card Antoine extracted from his pocket, grabbed the wallet, replaced the card inside it. He took a key-ring, a notebook, a pen. 'Now, that ring on your finger...'

  'I must have the wallet...' Antoine was removing the ring from his finger, protesting and obeying at the same time. 'My ring is gold . . . there is one thousand francs inside the wallet, some photos ...'

  LeCat took the ring. 'A gold ring may survive. The wallet may get blown a hundred metres away by the explosion. If that happened, if the wallet survived also, your identity would be confirmed. Which would be excellent, would it not?' The face came closer in the gloom as Antoine shivered from the chill in the hall. 'I told you, my friend, they are already dead. Go!'

  LeCat waited until Antoine had disappeared, then he walked inside the room beyond the half-open door. It was a dentist's surgery and the chair was occupied by a patient wearing his overcoat, a small, lean man about the height and build of Jean-Philippe Antoine. LeCat went over to the chair, placed the ring carefully on the limp hand lying in the patient's lap. The head was slumped forward and a smear of blood showed at the back of the skull.

  The dentist's nurse lay on the floor face downwards, her legs curled, her white coat rumpled. It was cold inside the surgery and the window which faced the back garden was rimed with frost. No oil had arrived for a fortnight and the tank in the back garden was empty. LeCat finished distributing Antoine's possessions among the dead patient's pockets he had earlier emptied, then took one last look around the bleak room.

  The dentist, wearing a white jacket and dark trousers, was sprawled at the foot of the dental chair. Like his nurse and his patient, he was also dead. A quarter of an hour before Antoine had arrived this frozen tableau had been alive. The dentist had been attending to his new patient, quite unaware that this stranger who had made his appointment to arrive just before Antoine's own appointment was a miserable Parisian pickpocket.

  LeCat had searched Montmartre to find the right man, someone who was approximately the height, build and age of Antoine, someone not too bright who could be persuaded to make a dental appointment in exchange for the payment of a small sum of money. He had gathered from LeCat that the dentist was playing mothers and fathers with his nurse, who happened to be LeCat's wife, so a witness was needed. Not for any sordid court case where the pickpocket's record would be exposed, LeCat had assured him, but simply to teach the adulterer a lesson.

  Everything was now correct, LeCat decided. He glanced at the patient's record files where a drawer was half-pulled out of the filing-case, patted his breast pocket to feel the bulge of record cards inside his jacket. Everything correct. Walking back into the gloomy hall, he bent down and turned a switch on a large box. Three minutes to detonation. He checked his watch where the sweep hand moved clearly round on the illuminated dial. He went quickly along the hall, through the doorway at the end and out of the back door. Then he started running, keeping below the level of the garden wall, through the open gate at the bottom
and along the frosted track beyond until he reached the car parked behind a copse of evergreens.

  The engine of the Renault was running and Antoine was sitting in the back beside another shadowy figure. LeCat climbed in behind the wheel, closed the door quietly, checked his watch. Sixty seconds... He drove rapidly along the track, away from the house hidden by the evergreens. He was turning on to a main road when they heard the b-o-o-m. In the back seat Antoine gave a little cry of horror which LeCat ignored. He felt the Shockwave push the side of the car, which he also ignored.

  The time-bomb, two hundred pounds of gelignite, had totally demolished the house and little that was identifiable was left of the three corpses which had lain inside it. Six people in Nantes knew that Jean-Philippe Antoine had a dental appointment at ten in the morning - he had been careful to tell them this - and it was obvious he had died in the explosion. The force of the bomb was so great it shattered the patient's body, making it impossible to check identity by the most foolproof method known to science -by Antoine's dental records. No teeth were found to check, and in any case his dental records were inside LeCat's jacket pocket.

  There were good reasons for the precautions LeCat had taken. In France the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (counter-intelligence) does not like it when key security risks go abroad on unexplained visits. And France had just lost one of her more promising nuclear physicists.

  * * * *

  Travelling under different names and carrying false papers, LeCat and Antoine arrived at Dorval airport, Montreal, during a blizzard. There is nothing conspicuous about two Frenchmen arriving in Montreal, a city where French is widely spoken. A car was waiting to take them away the moment they had passed through Immigration and Customs.

  LeCat handed Antoine over to Andrd Dupont, who escorted the nuclear physicist to a motel for the night. Dupont and Antoine did not linger in eastern Canada; the following morning they caught a CPR train and stayed aboard until it reached Vancouver on the Pacific coast. On arrival they went straight to a house in Dusquesne Street.