The Key to Rebecca - Ken Follett [36]
After a moment’s hesitation, Imam stood up.
Sadat’s eyes blazed with triumph.
Two days later Kernel walked the three miles from central Cairo to the suburb where Sadat lived. As a detective inspector, Kernel had the use of an official car whenever he wanted it, but he rarely used one to go to rebel meetings, for security reasons. In all probability his police colleagues would be sympathetic to the Free Officers Movement; still, he was not in a hurry to put them to the test.
Kemel was fifteen years older than Sadat, yet his attitude to the younger man was one almost of hero worship. Kemel shared Sadat’s cynicism, his realistic understanding of the levers of political power; but Sadat had something more, and that was a burning idealism which gave him unlimited energy and boundless hope.
Kernel wondered how to tell him the news.
The message to Rommel had been typed out, signed by Sadat and all the leading Free Officers except the absent Nasser and sealed in a big brown envelope. The aerial photographs of British positions had been taken. Imam had taken off in his Gladiator, with Baghdadi following in a second plane. They had touched down in the desert to pick up Kernel, who had given the brown envelope to Imam and climbed into Baghdadi’s plane. Imam’s face had been shining with youthful idealism.
Kernel thought: How will I break it to Sadat?
It was the first time Kernel had flown. The desert, so featureless from ground level, had been an endless mosaic of shapes and patterns : the patches of gravel, the dots of vegetation and the carved volcanic hills. Baghdadi said: “You’re going to be cold,” and Kernel thought he was joking—the desert was like a furnace—but as the little plane climbed the temperature dropped steadily, and soon he was shivering in his thin cotton shirt.
After a while both planes had turned due east, and Baghdadi spoke into his radio, telling base that Imam had veered off course and was not replying to radio calls. As expected, base told Baghdadi to follow Imam. This little pantomime was necessary so that Baghdadi, who was to return, should not fall under suspicion.
They flew over an army encampment. Kernel saw tanks, trucks, field guns and jeeps. A bunch of soldiers waved: they must be British, Kernel thought. Both planes climbed. Directly ahead they saw signs of battle: great clouds of dust, explosions and gunfire. They turned to pass to the south of the battlefield.
Kernel had thought: We flew over a British base, then a battlefield—next we should come to a German base.
Ahead, Imam’s plane lost height. Instead of following, Baghdadi climbed a little more—Kernel had the feeling that the Gladiator was near its ceiling—and peeled off to the south. Looking out of the plane to the right, Kemel saw what the pilots had seen: a small camp with a cleared strip marked as a runway.
Approaching Sadat’s house, Kernel recalled how elated he had felt, up there in the sky above the desert, when he realized they were behind German lines, and the treaty was almost in Rommel’s hands.
He knocked on the door. He still did not know what to tell Sadat.
It was an ordinary family house, rather poorer than Kernel’s home. In a moment Sadat came to the door, wearing a galabiya and smoking a pipe. He looked at Kemel’s face, and said immediately: “It went wrong.”
“Yes.” Kernel stepped inside. They went into the little room Sadat used as a study. There were a desk, a shelf of books and some cushions on the bare floor. On the desk an army pistol lay on top of a pile of papers.
They sat down. Kernel said: “We found a German camp with a runway. Imam descended. Then the Germans started to fire on his plane. It was an English plane, you see—we never considered that.”
Sadat said: “But surely, they could see he was not hostile—he did not fire, did not drop bombs—”
“He just kept on going down,” Kernel went on. “He waggled his wings, and I suppose he tried to raise them on the radio; anyway they kept firing. The tail of the plane took a hit.”
“Oh, God.”
“He