'Necessary?' Rawcliff rested his head back against the pillow. 'G.o.d forgive me.' He closed his eyes. 'Why didn't you have me killed, like the others?'

'A whim. A sentimental streak, perhaps. When we met so fortuitously in Nicosia, I was rather amused by your cheek -and by the resourcefulness of your wife. You were so obviously superior to the others, that I decided that it would be a waste to squander you. You are an excellent pilot and a brave man.

It is not your fault that you are not as physically fit as Sammy - few men are. You have been overcome by sheer fatigue, both mental and physical.' He patted his arm again. 'Have no worries - I don't blame you. I have seen it happen many times, even to the strongest men.'

'My wife,' said Rawcliff. 'My child.'

Pol was shaking his head. 'I am afraid, my friend, that they are the price you must pay. You must never see them again - never attempt to contact them, even through a third party. You would lead straight to her, and she to you. You would both be eliminated - after you had both been thoroughly interrogated, of course. And if they were not satisfied that you had told them all, they might use your child as an incentive. The Arabs, in particular. It would not bepleasant.

'Besides, my friend, I have it on the best authority that your wife does not take a very generous view of our successful operation yesterday morning.' He sat stroking hi; little goatee beard. 'Women are so rarely rational creatures Practical, yes. But they lack imagination, they lack the grand perspective.

There is such a thing as a necessary evil - if only to prevent greater evil.

What I helped to plan and what you helped to execute, I see as a drastic operation to remove a cancer from the earth's midst. Unhappily your wife is one of those who interprets it merely as murder - on a very large scale.

'But I have it on the same good authority,' he continued, 'that she and your child will be cared for and protected. Like you - money, a new ident.i.ty, a fresh start, fresh pastures. You must not grieve for her, my friend. She will survive. So will you. And there are many other women in the world.'

Rawcliff lay for some time with his eyes closed. 'By the way, what happened to Jo?' But he only asked to break the silence: he wasn't really interested. He was thinking of Judith and little Tom, trying to remember what they looked like. He hadn't even got any photographs of them. And he wondered if time could erase such memories, and how long it would take?

Pol was telling him about Jo - making a little joke, about how she was probably at that moment sunning herself by the pool of the Tel Aviv Hilton. He went on to explain that the Israelis had almost certainly found out about the operation in advance - the Mossad always found out about everything -and that they had used Jo as a contact, to keep them informed in case anything went wrong. In the obvious sense, Pol said, the Israelis stood as much to gain as anyone: but in another, they were most likely to take the blame when it was all over. For this reason they had no doubt reserved the option right up to the last minute, of stymying the operation - if necessary, by shooting down the planes before they reached their target.

But Rawcliff wasn't listening. Pol's words rang meaninglessly round the steel walls of his skull.-Judith, Tom. Oh G.o.d, what have I done to them?

Some time later he managed to concentrate enough to ask Pol, 'So who was behind the whole thing? It wasn't just you? Or the French Government? They'd never have dared act on their own, even through a freelance gangster like you.'

Pol smiled at the insult. 'There are always some secrets, my friend, which are best kept until the grave. Is it not sufficient that the vast majority of the world's Muslim population appear to have been beautifully deceived by the operation? Confused, demoralized, their political will broken, their unity destroyed. Above all, their material greed and extortionate pricing of oil have now, so they pathetically believe, been condemned by the ultimate judge - the one and only G.o.d, Allah. We can therefore say, man cher, that for the moment at least, the Islamic Revival had been stopped in its tracks.'

Rawcliff nodded, his eyes still closed. No mean achievement, as far as he was concerned - for the mere price of his wife and child. Poor little Tom. Poor little boy. While his father was now able to enjoy, in contemplative solitude, the luxurious sanctuary of one of the best hotels in the world: looking forward to a hard-earned 50,000 tax free, and the sure knowledge that working for Pol would be more rewarding than selling booze at the wrong end of London's Fulham Road.

He had begun to weep quietly. He did not hear Pol leave.

Six.

On that Friday morning, at precisely 7.22 am, Middle East time, a crowd estimated at over three million was gathered in Mecca, the holiest city of Islam. It was the height of the Hadj. the annual pilgrimage which all devout Muslims are required to make at least once in their life-time.

They had come from all the corners of the Islamic world -from the crescent of the Middle East, reaching down from the Soviet border to the Nubian desert and the jungles of Black Africa; from Morocco and Mauritania and Nigeria, across the sand-seas of the Sahara, to the crowded Nile Delta and the oil-rich lands of the Arabian Peninsula; from the rice-paddies of Indonesia and the Philippines, to the mountains of Pakistan and the coffee-shops of Istanbul.

They had come in families, in package-tours, singly, in luxury; crippled and aging and dying, in filth and penury; by bus and jumbo jet, by private plane and leaking boats to Jeddah, finishing the journey in air-conditioned limousines, on camels and bicycles, on feet festering with sores.

They had pitched their tents over miles of sand, on the Plain of Ararat, beneath the ring of naked mountains, eating little, sleeping almost not at all, praying perpetually. Towards the centre of the city the crowd on this early Friday morning was packed so densely that in the centre, in the forecourt of the Grand Mosque, under the seven white minarets, the pilgrims were almost unable to move, unable to reach the Holy of Holies - the Ka'aba, a windowless oblong stone building, draped in black and gold, which is said to have been built by Abraham, and which contains in one corner the 'Black Stone'

- a meteorite which Islamic lore decrees was given to Ismail by the Archangel Gabriel.

At 7.22 am a Dru tribesman, who had travelled from the West Bank of the Jordan, and who was an accredited agent of the Israeli Mossad, witnessed the following: The chanting and wailing was overcome by a distant roar, which soon became a crescendo. Two minutes later, five enormous planes, without markings', appeared over the desert, so low that their shadows pa.s.sed like great clouds 'covering the sun. They had appeared over the mountains with a speed and suddenness that seemed to freeze the millions of pilgrims, who halted their chanting and stood gazing upwards.

The planes flew in a low circle round the city, their noise echoing like thunder, so that, now that the first tremor had pa.s.sed, many of the pilgrims again began wailing and calling to G.o.d, certain that these great machines were some visitation from Heaven.

Then the first plane became silent. Its engines had cut, and above the roar of its companions came the words, ringing out over the desert and the Mosque, so that all could hear: 'ALLAH! ALLAH! ALLAH IS GREAT! ALLAH THE ONE AND ONLY G.o.d!.

I, ALI, AM NOW RETURNED AS THE MIRROR-IMAGE OF THE PROPHET.

I AM THE LONG-WAITED MAHDI! AND I SAY UNTO YE, OH WICKED MEN OF THE EARTH,.

THAT ALLAH IS MIGHTILY DISPLEASED WITH MAN'S DISTORTION OF ISLAM.

ISLAM HAS BECOME A MOCKERY OF ALLAH, A SATANIC TEMPLE BUILT UPON MAN'S GREED.

AND INTOLERANCE AND UNG.o.dLINESS TO MAN!.

AND MAN MUST BE PUNISHED!' As the words rang out, and the millions stood watching and listening as though turned to stone, the great plane began to fall to earth, into the middle of the Grand Mosque. It had pa.s.sed between the two minarets to the north-west of the building, when there was a flash, and it was as though the whole earth had exploded.

People a mile away felt the ground shudder, and some were thrown on to their faces, while others began to scream and tear at their clothes.

Above the Grand Mosque a cloud was rising as black as night, several thousand feet into the sky, and below this cloud was a boiling ma.s.s of flame. The two minarets were gone, and the five others, at the corners of the Mosque, were toppling and crumbling in pillars of dust.

And now, above the screaming, which came from more than a million throats, all calling on Allah for mercy, the second plane was silent and the words were repeated; then it too fell out of the sky and exploded above the centre of the Grand Mosque.

The report went on to describe how each of the five aircraft had flown round the Mosque, at a height of less than two hundred feet, and that each had cut its engines and broadcast its message, before plunging down into the inferno.

Several witnesses were to report that at the moment when the fifth plane stalled, and the Mahdi's voice boomed out across Mecca, a figure trailing a white plume - later identified as a half-opened parachute - was seen to leap out of the rear of the aircraft, and be consumed by 'the fire which spread like water', devouring the tall white modern buildings, and the great Islamic Conference Hall, which buckled and caved in under the heat like the collapsing skeleton of a mighty dinosaur; and 'all was bathed in a fiery smoke which was like the smoke of h.e.l.l. And when the last plane had fallen, the sky became like night'.

Later, as the smoke settled, a Maronite Lebanese, who had travelled to Mecca, with false papers, was able to establish that the city of Mecca - over an area extending from the suburb of Al Tibiyah to the north, to Al Misfalah in the south, and from the desert to the east, to the ancient bazaars along Hayfayir Street in the west - had been totally destroyed.

At the epicentre of the inferno - the Grand Mosque of Mecca - the ground had been blasted into crystals of gla.s.s and everywhere underfoot was a thick slime of roasted, congealed bodies. The planes had cut five deep swaths of destruction through the city, and almost no building within an eight-kilometre radius-remained untouched. The galleries and minarets of the Mosque had vanished. So too had the Ka'aba, reduced to scorched rubble amid the piles of dead. For those who had survived, the stench was hard to endure.

By noon, when the relief-convoys began to arrive from Jeddah, there came the sound of gunfire as looters were shot, trying to wrench the gold from the teeth and charred remains of the pilgrims. An estimated half-a-million had perished, with hundreds and thousands maimed or injured in the panic. Many others, having heard the message from the planes of death, chose to take their own lives accordingly.

Seven.

During the final hours of that Friday, while the UN Security Council was in special emergency session, and the major governments of the world calledcrisis meetings, the international stock-markets - in New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong - closed early. So did many of the central banks.

In the confusion, no undue interest was aroused in the little Swiss town of Aarlau, north of Berne, when various sums amounting to a total of thirteen million US dollars were credited that afternoon to the personal account, in a small private bank, of a French citizen, Charles Auguste Pol.

The money had been laundered through several ghost-companies registered in Liechtenstein, Grand Cayman, and the tiny Pyreneean republic of Andorra. It would have been impossible, afterwards, to track down its origin - debited, on that same Friday, at noon, from a special account recently opened by the Soviet Trade Mission to France, at the Moscow Narodny Bank, in the Boulevard Haussmann, Paris.

The end.