Rain of Doom

3

In a chrome-and-plastic lounge of Orly international airport, Colonel Dastgerdi of the Syrian army waited. The casual sports clothes he wore had been purchased in a Madrid men's shop. His lightweight headphones lulled him with a Spanish pop ballad. Surreptitiously he watched the entrances, studying the face of every passenger who emerged from the terminal.

Two days earlier he had flown from Managua to Madrid. After a few hours' delay, he continued to Paris, and there spent a night in a luxurious hotel, enjoying the French cuisine and an expensive Vietnamese prostitute. Recalling the pleasures of that evening, he consulted his wristwatch. In a few minutes he would be departing on another long flight. Destination: Damascus.

A man approached, also wearing the lightweight headphones of a portable cassette player. His nondescript Semitic features and cheap clothing — a gray sport coat and gray slacks — made him appear like a poor, grubby, foreign laborer, one of thousands in Europe. The portable cassette player enhanced the image of the hardworking Arab returning home to the distant East with his savings and a few luxuries after a year's work in the West. Dastgerdi looked elsewhere as the man crossed the lounge and sat beside him.

In Arabic the man asked, "What are you listening to?"

Dastgerdi pulled the tape player from his coat pocket and ejected the cassette. "See?"

The man took the cassette, looked at the label. "I don't read Spanish." Passing it back, he took another from his pocket. "You might like this. Play it when you are home."

It was pocketed. Though the case bore the label of a Swedish singing group, the tape carried digital information that could be decoded only by an American desktop computer, like the one in Dastgerdi's Damascus office.

A United Nations diplomat had purchased several of the small computers from an ordinary electronics shop in New York City. They were shipped as diplomatic papers to Moscow. Then Soviet technicians modified and reprogrammed them to serve as coding machines. Their outward appearance remained unchanged. Though the codes they created would not withstand the scrutiny of the American National Security Agency or the Soviet KGB, the codes did deny outsiders access to Dastgerdi's communications. And the cassettes, appearing to contain only music, would pass by customs inspectors without difficulty.

"Any other information?" Dastgerdi asked.

His companion glanced at the predominantly European passengers around them, who would be seeing only two Middle Easterners chatting about music before their respective flights. Then he spoke in a low voice.

"Fascist contrashit the port. Choufi is dead, Gabriel is dead. But there has been no compromise of the mission. The Nicaraguans drove away the fascists and annihilated them in the mountains."

The news seemed to disrupt Dastgerdi's equanimity; in fact, only by the strength of his years of training could he mask his rage and panic. With a false smile he asked, "They attacked, therefore they know. But how— if there has been no compromise? How did they know?"

"The Nicaraguans say there are many attacks on the coast. The fascists kill Cubans and Soviets and Sandinista leaders. It was only bad luck for your men. If the fascists knew of your mission, they would have taken Choufi and Gabriel as prisoners, not killed them."

Dastgerdi nodded. "True..."

A public-address voice announced the departure of the flight to Syria. Dastgerdi rose, discreetly waved to the informant and disappeared into a crowd of embarking passengers.

Despite their precautions and belief that they had not been noticed, the meeting of Dastgerdi and his informant had indeed been studied with interest. Across the lounge, a French counterintelligence agent noted the number and destination of Dastgerdi's flight and continued to watch his unidentified contact.

As Dastgerdi flew to Damascus, the French counterintelligence office transmitted his information to an Agency contact in the United States.