Snap Shot Read online

  On Sunday, 7th June 1981, Israeli F16 jet aircraft bombed and destroyed the Iraqi nuclear installation at El-Tuwaitha. This is the subject and the heart of A. J. Quinnell’s spellbinding new thriller. But there are many strands of recent history, of characters real and invented, of violence and vendettas woven into the complex secret aspects of ‘the great game’ that preceded the raid.

  Part of the story began in Vietnam. Among the dozens of professional photographers from the world’s newspapers, David Munger was outstanding. When one of their colleagues got killed - quite a common event - it was customary to auction his effects, cameras and their adjuncts, to raise money for dependants. Fancy prices were paid as charity. No such charity attended the auction of Munger’s gear. Munger was still alive. Why had he packed up, deserted, vanished? No one knew.

  A glorious heroine, Ruth Paget, plays a central and dramatic role. It is a story interspersed with murder and perversion, bribery and economic blackmail, religious and ethnic intolerance and, occasionally, with acts of intense love and courage. It is the story of a great photographer; his descent into a nightmare and his struggle to climb back out with the help and love of a woman.

  The raid itself is the climax. The author postulates that something more happened on that fateful day than was ever reported.

  A. J. Quinnell is a pseudonym. His first novel, Man on Fire, caused a stir on both sides of the Atlantic and was short-listed for a major award. Next came The Mahdi. With Snap Shot Quinnell takes another great step forward - it is compulsive reading, you have to turn the page.

  A. J. Quinnell is the pseudonym of the author of ten novels including Man on Fire which was made twice into Hollywood Films - most recently directed by Tony Scott for Twentieth Century Fox in 2004, starring Denzel Washington, Christopher Walken and Dakota Fanning. The book sold more than eight million copies in paperback and was translated around the world.

  Full list of titles:

  Man on Fire

  The Mahdi

  Snap Shot

  Blood Ties

  Siege of Silence

  In the Name of the Father

  The Perfect Kill

  The Blue Ring

  Message from Hell

  Black Horn

  SNAP SHOT

  A. J. Quinnell

  First published in Great Britain by Macmillan London Ltd in 1982

  Copyright © A. J. Quinnell 1982

  Published by CLLA

  The right of A. J. Quinnell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  ISBN: 978-1-908426-06-2

  With profound thanks to ‘Multy’ and ‘Speedy’

  for technical assistance with the aerial

  and photographic sequences.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Book Two

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Book Three

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Book Four

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  EPILOGUE

  Prologue

  At 16.40 hours on Sunday, 7th June, 1981, fourteen aircraft took off from the Israeli Air Force base at Etzion in the Sinai desert. All were advance fighter aircraft: eight F16’s and six F15’s. But for this mission the F16’s had been stripped of their cannon and air-to-air missiles and armed instead with 2000 lb bombs and long range fuel tanks. The F15’s were to act as cover and so retained their conventional weapons, although they too carried long range tanks.

  The aircraft passed low over the Gulf of Aqaba, the F15’s flying slightly higher and bracketing the F16’s.

  Six minutes after take-off the formation crossed the Saudi Arabian coastline and followed a course which paralleled the Jordanian border.

  At 16.52 hours a Jordanian Air Force sergeant technician at the Ma’an base abruptly straightened in his seat as fourteen blips eased onto the radar screen in front of him. Thirty seconds later the Ma’an control tower was asking the aircraft to identify themselves. Their leader did so in fluent Arabic, explaining that they were a Saudi Arabian squadron on exercises from the base at Tabuk. He exchanged the appropriate code words and some pleasantries with the Ma’an control and they proceeded eastward. Three minutes later the fourteen blips slid off the radar screen.

  There is no integrated military air control system between Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Consequently Ma’an control did not report the flight either to Tabuk or any other Arab air base.

  At 17.00 hours the squadron banked onto a new course taking them East-North-East in a direct line to the Iraqi border.

  Approximately 500 miles East-South-East of their position, an American operated A.W.A.C. surveillance plane was flying at 30,000 feet. It was on loan to the Saudi Arabian Government, nervous in the aftermath of the conflict between Iran and Iraq. Its sophisticated antennae were aimed eastwards over the Persian Gulf and the skilled and alert technicians saw nothing of the fourteen intruders who skirted the periphery of their electronic vision.

  At 17.10 hours the aircraft passed undetected over the Iraqi border and sixteen minutes later were over their target: the French built Tammuz I nuclear reactor at El-Tuwaitha, ten and a half miles south-west of Baghdad. As the F16’s climbed and wheeled to put the lowering sun behind them in the classic bombing manoeuvre, the F15’s took up position to intercept any Iraqi fighters which might be scrambled in time to interfere.

  At 17.32 hours the first F16 made its low level run and, with devastating precision, dropped its 2000 lb bomb through the reactor’s protective dome. The others quickly followed, all performing with equal accuracy. Onboard cameras recorded the complete destruction of the reactor and the total success of the mission.

  These facts became known and widely reported throughout the world.

  What is not generally known is that of the eight F16’s only seven dropped their bombs at El-Tuwaitha. The eighth made a brief diversion seven miles away.

  During the raid several senior Israeli Air Force officers in the command room of the Israeli base at Etzion stood in a tense group listening to the radio voice-relays of the F16 pilots. Major-General David Ivri stood to one side. Next to him was a civilian. He was a gross intrusion amid the military atmosphere, for he was short but obscenely fat and dressed in a white linen suit with a dark green tie. Rings sparkled on his fingers.

  As the voice of each pilot in turn reported the success of his bombing run, the tension among the officers dissipated to be replaced by rising exultation. Only the fat man retained his anxious expression. Then, after a brief pause, the voice of the eighth pilot crackled through the loudspeaker. It was the voice of a man the fat man knew well, for only a few hours ago he had been in deep conversation with him.

  Now the voice came over the airwaves from 500 miles away and reported that he too had dropped his bomb - exactly on target. Slowly the civilian’s tightly clenched fingers relaxed and a small smile straightened his over-large lips. One or two of the officers glanced at him curiously for despite his appearance they knew he was privy to secrets far
beyond their ken.

  The destruction of the Tammuz I reactor at El-Tuwaitha was one of the most controversial air raids in history. The blast created a global shock wave. The Iraqis, backed by the French, claimed that the nuclear installation was strictly for peaceful purposes. The Israelis claimed otherwise. In fact they viewed it as an imminent threat to their very existence. The story of the building of Tammuz I is interspersed with bribery and economic blackmail, murder and perversion, religious and ethnic intolerance, and occasionally with acts of great courage.

  This is part of that story - and why one F16 did not drop its bomb on Tammuz I.

  It is a work of fiction.

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  Click . . .

  The bastardized Nikon crystallized the image of the black sergeant sprinting across the clearing with a clattering M16 at his hip.

  Click . . .

  In the next image he was spinning like a marionette, jerked not by strings but a hose of bullets from a hidden machine gun.

  Click . . .

  He was humped over on the ground. The last convulsive twitch of death, frozen onto film.

  A cloud edged under the sun and Munger’s fingers adjusted the aperture control. He heard a shouted command and saw the captain break from cover to his left, running in a shuffling crouch, submachine gun slung across his back, a grenade in each hand.

  The two Belgians slanted in from the right, spraying the trees ahead with their M16’s.

  Click . . .

  The Nikon recorded the Belgians’ moment of supreme bad luck. The hidden machine gunner, faced with a choice, selected them as his first target. He was skilled and experienced. A two-second burst was enough to flop them back like rag dolls.

  From opposite sides of the clearing the machine gun barrel and Munger’s camera traversed towards the captain. Munger was faster.

  Click . . .

  The captain, diving forwards and hurling a grenade.

  Click . . .

  The captain on his belly, trying to squash his body into the earth as bullets scythed over him.

  Then the crump of the grenade and a brief silence followed by more gunfire as the rest of the patrol charged across the clearing.

  It was soon over and Munger turned away and saw the Vietcong prisoner sitting alone, arms bound behind his back, a noose around his neck tethering him to a tree. For a moment their eyes locked. The Asian’s were inscrutable, the Englishman’s blank. The camera came up.

  Click . . .

  It was the last frame on the spool.

  They did not bury the dead, theirs or the enemy’s. For these men, such a courtesy had long since withered. They marched quickly to get away from the scene and the hostile territory. The Meo scouts were out ahead. The captain had cuffed and kicked them for not spotting the ambush. He cared nothing for the dead members of his command but he cared a great deal for military skill and discipline. The lack of it created his only emotion: anger. It still smouldered long after they had bivouacked for the night.

  He sat surly and uncommunicative whilst the others joked and made plans for their imminent R. & R. in Saigon. They would reach Vinh Long by noon the next day, hand over their prisoner and get a chopper ride to the big city.

  Occasionally they glanced curiously at the photographer sitting by himself a few yards away. They felt pride at having him on their patrol; also admiration, for they had seen his courage under fire. Their own courage was bolstered by their weapons and they found it hard to understand how a man could face bullets with only a camera, could hold it steady and photograph someone trying to kill him. They discussed this for a while. The Australian thought that maybe he was so engrossed in his work he forgot about the bullets. The Frenchman thought otherwise.

  ‘He has no heart and no soul - so how can he feel anything - even fear?’

  The Frenchman was wrong. At that very moment Munger was experiencing fear. Not for his physical being but for his mind. There was something in the recesses of his brain that should not be there. Something trying to force its way forward. He was frightened because although only thirty years old, he had long ago concluded an exercise that gave him precise control over his emotions. He had a cast iron mental discipline, so it frightened him to have something bouncing around back there, out of control. He tried to pin it down, to capture and expunge it. What was bothering him? The horrors he had witnessed during the past ten days? The callous brutality of the men sitting so close? After ten years of such work he was immune both to horror and human brutality, just as he was immune to real affection or intimacy.

  Was it something from the more distant past? His mind went back, assessing and cataloguing, but when it reached his boyhood a shutter came down - the shutter that always came down.

  He gave up and, perhaps for something to occupy his mind, carried a water bottle over to the prisoner and held it to his lips. The water was gulped thirstily - all of it. Munger should have kept some for himself for the morning, but as he held the bottle to the prisoner’s mouth, the prisoner’s eyes held his, and he could not move his hand.

  Had he thought about that, Munger might have understood what was bouncing around in the back of his brain.

  Four nights later he was sitting at an outside table of a restaurant on Rue Catinat. The restaurant was busy, its clientele a mixture of servicemen, correspondents and businessmen.

  On a chair just inside the main door sat the owner - a fat Frenchman. He was irritated with Munger for he was taking up a whole table and he had finished his omelette two hours before. Since then he had been drinking a succession of vodka sodas. Had it been anyone else, the owner would have made a comment just rude enough to clear the table, but he knew all about Munger - he was not a man to offend lightly. He watched him curiously and decided that he was ill; his lean face was pinched and his blue eyes sunk deep into their sockets. It could not be the drink for, despite a prodigious capacity for vodka, no one had ever seen Munger truly drunk.

  Munger was not ill - at least not physically, He was, however, exhausted, for he had hardly slept for four days and now, even though his body and brain ached from fatigue, he could not get up and go back to his hotel room. He wanted no personal contact but he desperately needed the noise and movement of people around him. He needed something to occupy his mind - to divert it.

  A brown, mongrel dog crossed the road, hopping between the cars, motor bikes and trishaws. It was a pathetic sight, small and scrawny and holding one front foot clear of the ground. There was dried blood on the paw; either a casualty of the traffic or some mindless cruelty. It started sniffing among the tables and one of the waiters aimed a kick. As it hopped away the restaurant owner nodded in approval. From his vantage point he could survey the whole restaurant and inside the bar. A minute later he nodded again in approval. Munger had called out to the waiter to bring him a large sirloin steak, very rare. Obviously the omelette had not been enough.

  The dog sat out of range and watched with hungry eyes as the waiter put the plate in front of Munger, watched as Munger carefully cut the meat into cubes and then watched with rising disbelief as Munger leaned down, put the plate onto the pavement and beckoned. Slowly it edged forward, its nose twitching, its eyes darting back and forth between the pink meat and the astonished waiter.

  The restaurant owner pushed himself to his feet. All the other diners had stopped eating and were watching Munger and the approaching mongrel.

  ‘Monsieur . . .’ began the owner indignantly. And then Munger turned and the owner looked into his bleak, blue eyes which had darkened and narrowed.

  ‘It’s paid for.’

  All eyes, including the mongrel’s, watched the confrontation. The Frenchman’s mouth opened and closed like a beached fish. Then, with a shrug of disgust, he turned away. Someone laughed and the dog edged up to the plate and started eating. It was no longer nervous, sensing that it was under protection.

  At a nearby table two American correspondents watched with interest.
One of them said:

  ‘Munger’s getting soft in his old age.’

  The other laughed, ‘I doubt it. He probably did it just to rile old Montague.’ They looked at Munger curiously, as he stared down at the dog rapidly clearing the plate.

  ‘He looks ill,’ the first one commented, and the other nodded in agreement.

  ‘Maybe it’s finally getting to him. He’s been covering this war for years with hardly a break. He’s hooked on it like a junkie and it’s eating him from the inside out.’

  ‘No,’ the other disagreed. ‘Until the last couple of days I’ve seen no change in him. Curious. He fiddled his way onto that Special Forces patrol but since he got back he’s filed no snaps. None at all.’

  The other shrugged. ‘So maybe nothing interesting happened.’

  ‘When Munger’s around something always happens,’ came the reply. ‘No, something happened all right, but I can’t think what it was that could bother a man like Munger.’

  They turned back to their food and started discussing the latest peace initiative.

  The dog had finished the steak and was sitting close to Munger’s legs. He reached down and scratched the top of its head. Its tail thumped and it licked his hand.

  He had not fed it to rile the restaurant owner. He genuinely liked dogs and had an affinity with them. It was the affinity of a lonely man - a man with a character so formed that he could find no way to communicate emotion to other human beings. It was said of him that he was merely a shell; nothing more than a finger on the button of a camera.

  But for all that, he liked dogs.

  Janine Lesage arrived from Bangkok two nights later. As she drove in a taxi to the city she felt relief and anticipation. She had been three weeks in Bangkok and she hated the place. It was a man’s city, with its hundreds of massage parlours, dance halls and brothels. She much preferred Saigon. It also catered for men, but with the war on it had a masculinity which stimulated her. It also had Munger and she was eager to be with him.